Her Mother's Daughter (34 page)

And sometimes Daddy would bring the radio into the living room and turn it on there, and they would sit listening. But other times they just sat, silent, for hours, so that Anastasia fell asleep, knowing that she'd been asleep only when she awoke at the smell of tea and toast being prepared, and knew that it was eleven o'clock, and her parents were having their bedtime snack. But she always fell asleep before they actually came into the bedroom and undressed and got into the double bed. She never saw or heard that.

BELLE MOVED LIKE A
person who has been very ill and is just beginning to walk independently again—as if every gesture had to be planned and executed with deliberation. In her youth, she had been quick of gesture, but now her movements were slow. Only when she was cooking did her hands work swiftly. And sometimes, as she bent for some task, she would raise her head in confusion, unsure where she was. She glanced at her hand: she held a man's white shirt, damp. What was it and where was she? Her glance fell on a porcelain basin on the tarpaper roof of an apartment building, rose to the scene around her—a sky dotted with dirty clouds, apartments, an elevated-train track. She turned slowly, like an arthritic. In one hand she held this wet shirt, in the other a clothespin. Well, she knew what she was supposed to do with those, and she did it, not bothering, for the moment, to decipher the clues around her. She knew everything would come back. She would bend again: another white shirt, and their some tiny underclothes, a child's. Anastasia's. Yes.

She could remember Anastasia, and even Ed, whose white shirt that was, but sometimes she could not recall how she had got from there to here, how her old life, so many years of it, had led her to
this
rooftop,
this
clothesline. Dispersed. Everything she had known was gone, dispersed. That was a real word, wasn't it? How had she learned such an elegant word, being as stupid as she was? It was a fine word. Dispersed. Dispersed. She believed she even knew how to spell it: d-i-s-p-e-r-s-e-d. Brooklyn and the rooftops there, not very different from this one, yet different; Momma, Poppa, Euga, Eddie, Wally; the school where the teacher spoke a foreign language and she was stupid; the streets, the peddlers, the pushcarts, the horse-drawn drays; the sweatshops, the machines, whirrrrrrrr. All day.

They had their photograph taken on the roof of the house on…which one was it? Lorimer Street, maybe. So many streets, so many railroad flats, one worse than the other, the worst of all that terrible one behind the other building, always dark, you had to go outside and into another building to go to the toilet, Momma crying….Dispersed. Yet things were not that different….

No, this thing she had in her hand now, it was a tiny bib, a baby's. Anastasia was four and a half, it wasn't hers. It was Joy's! Yes, the new one, the one who laughed and gurgled and reached out her arms to her mommy, Belle wouldn't have them say Momma the way she had, Americans didn't say that. She was American now. Americans lived in this place where she was now, Jamaica. They wore neat hats and high heels and dark wool coats and spoke very precisely without the slightest accent. And the only way they knew she, Belle, was different from them was from her name, Dabrowski, that was a foreign name, Polish. They all had neat American names, Wallis, Goldthorpe, Thacker, Jones. Maybe Goldthorpe was Jewish, but Mrs. Goldthorpe didn't look Jewish, and neither did Eleanor, her little girl. Belle thought she was American. Jews were like Poles, foreign, they ate black bread with sweet butter and spoke with accents and wore brown sweaters with big holes in the sleeves.

These diapers now, they were Joy's too. When had she washed them? She must have done it, they were clean. She couldn't remember. Joy. She wondered what joy felt like. She felt she knew what the word meant even though she also knew she had never felt anything like it: joy. But how could you understand a word denoting an emotion if you have never felt it? Maybe she had. Maybe the day she stole the
chruściki
and gave one to her little friend she had felt joy. What was her name, that little girl? Dispersed. No, that wasn't the right word.

Joy felt joy: she was a baby who smiled, not like Anastasia. But Anastasia was a genius, come out of her, Bella, a stupid kid who couldn't even manage to comb her hair, who couldn't understand what the teacher was saying, who almost killed her baby sister leading her across a street. How could that happen, a being like Anastasia, who looked at you as if she knew everything you knew and more and yet she was only a child? But she was cruel too. “You don't love me,” she'd said to Belle, just the other day. When Belle had sacrificed everything, her entire life, for Anastasia; when she had given up all her ambitions, her dreams, her hopes, in order to have this child. Belle had felt unable to speak when Anastasia said that. She had turned away so Anastasia wouldn't see the lump in her throat. Love? Anastasia would never understand.

Joy would never say a thing like that to her mother, Belle knew it. Joy would grow up the way she was now, smiling and happy, her plump little cheeks pink, her eyes full of laughter. Everyone loved Joy, all the ladies loved her. Belle was lucky. She had had two daughters, just as she would have chosen. She never wanted a son. And here they were, so different, yet both came out of her. That was lucky. Yes, things were a little better.

She bent for the last pieces of laundry. She remembered now. She'd washed it in the deep tub in her apartment, scrubbed it on the board, rinsed it, starched those pieces that needed starch, blued the white things, wrung it out well. It was hard to wring with your hands. It hurt. But she wrung it out well and shook it before she pinned it to the clothesline here on the roof. She had done it well. She always tried to do things well. She wanted to be a proper lady. She didn't want to lie around crying all day, to cry all the time like Momma. And this afternoon, she would put on her hat and coat and stockings and heels and take the girls to the park, her girls, and say good afternoon to the other ladies and maybe even sit on a bench with them and chat for a while. That was what proper ladies did.

Her feet hurt. They had grown again during her pregnancy with Joy, and she had been able to buy only one new pair of shoes in a larger size, and she kept those for good, she wouldn't wear them to do laundry in. These were her good shoes from before, black suede with a bow, but they were too small and crunched her toes. All her other shoes were far too small now, and had to be given away. It wasn't fair, really, that she had such big feet. She wasn't tall. Size 8 had been bad, but then she went to an 8 ½ with Anastasia, and now she needed a 9! Such big feet and hands, and thick legs too. Tears began to well in her throat and she stopped and stood very still and erect and breathed deeply.

She…had…to…Have to. Must. What? Hurry. Yes, hurry. Because downstairs. She had to go downstairs. Yes, because the children were alone, alone. Anastasia was grown up, she would know enough not to play with matches or climb up on anything but still…She had reached the bottom of the enamel basin and saw some water lying in it. If she tried to carry it back downstairs, it would swish and spill. But what would happen if she poured it out here, on the roof? Would it leak into someone's apartment? If they saw a puddle there, would they reprimand her? The superintendent might scold her. That would be devastating.

She picked up the wide basin, big enough to bathe a baby in (and often used for that purpose), and some of the water spilled over the side onto her old good black suede shoes. She walked carefully, carrying it toward the door of the staircase. Then she glanced around. There were many posts with clotheslines strung on them on the roof, and two other women had laundry hanging out. She glanced around, and tiptoed toward another woman's laundry, and poured the water out on the roof under her wash.

Thinking about her feet and legs had upset her, and she knew she must calm down. She tried not to count as she descended the stairs to her floor, to her apartment 1A, Dabrowski. Counting made her cry. Think about good things, the doctor had said: When you feel you're going to cry, think about good things. Well, it was a good thing the weather was fair and she could hang the wash outside. Otherwise she had to hang it in the apartment, and duck under it all day long, and the place smelled of Clorox and dampness. And the laundry dripped and she had to put newspaper down under it. It was awful. It was good that the weather was good.

Yes, and when the weather was bad it was uncomfortable to take the girls for their walk in the afternoon. She wouldn't do it in bad weather if she could think of anything else to do with them. She would bundle Joy under many little woolen blankets and the leather protector that covered the top of the carriage, and put up an umbrella and try to get Anastasia to stay under it, and they would go out whatever the weather. But it was hard to hold an umbrella and push the carriage at the same time, although Anastasia loved to push the carriage, but she couldn't get it up and down the curbs…. So it was good the weather was good.

What else was good? Joy was a good baby, she rarely cried. And Anastasia was good too, she had stopped asking questions all the time, driving Belle crazy. And she, Belle, had a nice hat and coat and good new black suede shoes and when she went to the park, she looked as neat and nice as any of the other ladies, and they could not tell she was poor, poorer than they, poorer than anyone else she knew. No, she could conceal that. That was good.

By this time she had reached her apartment, and unlocked the door. She walked down the short dark hall to the kitchen and put the basin on the dish drain and wiped it dry with a dishcloth. She took off the old suede jacket she had worn to hang clothes in, and shook her head a little because her hair felt damp. Then she went to check on the children. Anastasia was lying on the living room floor as she often did. “Hello, Mommy,” she said, and sat up.

“Hello, Anastasia,” Belle said, on her way to the bedroom to check on Joy. Joy was still asleep in her little crib. Belle left the bedroom and went back to the kitchen, passing Anastasia without speaking. She was tired. She turned up the gas flame under the old aluminum drip coffeepot. There was some coffee left from breakfast. She would have a cup, and smoke a cigarette and relax a little. She let herself down in a chair and sighed. That would be good.

The silent months in Jamaica were broken by a few events so striking that they pierced the curtain of ice Anastasia felt had dropped around her. Sometimes, in the morning, when Mommy was washing or cleaning the house or taking care of Joy, Anastasia would put on her hat and coat and run outside with a ball and bounce it in the courtyard. Occasionally, she would venture to the sidewalk and gaze across the street at the park. The park was big and green, and it had a fence around it made of tall iron spears. Anastasia thought it looked like the fences around castles, although she had never seen a castle, and wondered how she knew that. Probably she had seen a picture, she thought. In the middle of the park was a bandstand, white wooden trelliswork with a peaked roof, and sometimes there were musicians sitting inside it playing band music, which was different from other music.

One day something was happening in the park, and Anastasia abandoned her ball bouncing and walked to the very edge of the sidewalk, as far as she dared to go. There was band music and many people in the park, some carrying flags. She wanted to run inside and ask Mommy why all the people were in the park, but she knew Mommy would be tired. So she remained where she was and tried to answer her question for herself. She moved from foot to foot as she stood there, because her Mary Janes were too small for her and they hurt her feet. She had a new pair Mommy had bought her for Easter, but they were for good. She tried to stand on tiptoe to see farther into the park, but that hurt her feet even more.

Then a very fat man with a bulbous red nose came out of the wide park gate and started to cross the street. There were cars parked all along the curb, and as the fat man stepped into the street, one of them backed up and squeezed him flat against the car on his other side. Anastasia cried “Oh!” and put her hands up in front of her eyes. There was blood in her eyes, blood on her hands. Blood. She tore back into the house, to Mommy.

“Mommy, Mommy! Come and see! A fat man got scrunched into a thin man between two cars. There is blood, Mommy!” she cried. She tugged at her mother's hand. But Mommy was tired. She was sitting at the table feeding Joy cereal.

“I can't come now, Anastasia,” she said in her tired voice.

Anastasia jumped up and down. “Please, Mommy, please come! There's blood!” (Would the fat man's fat all come out in one lump like from a lamb chop?) “Mommy, a man got squeezed!”

“I'm busy now, Anastasia,” Mommy said. “I'll come later.”

But Anastasia knew that later the man would be gone. She whimpered a bit, and stood there like a reproachful presence, but Mommy went on feeding Joy. Anastasia knew that if she cried or yelled, Mommy would talk to her in the very tired voice that sounded angry. She hung around the kitchen. She wanted to go back and see, but she wanted to go holding Mommy's hand, she didn't want to go out there again alone. But Mommy wasn't coming. She trudged back out, tentatively, and went slowly toward the edge of the sidewalk.

There was a big crowd of people around the place now. She could not see the man anymore. She couldn't see over the heads of the people. She couldn't see the blood. Maybe it hadn't happened. She slumped back into the house, and went into the living room and lay on the floor. She lay on her back so she wouldn't have to smell that horrible dusty smell of the carpet. She stared at the ceiling. What if the man had cried out asking for help when the car hit him? He was dead, he must be dead, and he wouldn't know that people had come and tried to help him. He would cry out and believe that no one came to help him.

Anastasia knew how that felt. She could remember the night she woke up and Mommy and Daddy were not home. She could not see Joy's cradle, either. The apartment was dark except for the light in the front hall. She called out, but no one answered. With the thought that she was alone came terror. She was paralyzed, too frightened even to get out of the crib and go into the next room and find them. She was too frightened even to get out of the crib and walk across the room to see if Joy's cradle was there on the other side of Mommy and Daddy's bed.