Her Mother's Daughter (46 page)

She dreaded going home. Everyone seemed grouchy as they walked the whole long way back carrying all their equipment. She was tired and dragged along the sidewalk. Even the flowers didn't smell as good. Then Daddy would say, “You wait here, Belle, and I'll bring the car around,” and they would slump down on a bench in the hot sun waiting a long time until Daddy got out of the parking lot and drove to where they were sitting with the Everhot and the umbrella and the beach chair and the two thermoses and the valise and the blanket and the towels and the tube and the pails and shovels and bathing caps full of sand. Everything was full of sand, and Anastasia's bottom hurt from sitting in it, and she knew there was a lot of sand inside her bathing suit and she wanted to reach in and scoop it out but she couldn't because that wasn't nice to do in public.

Of course, we'd always have to sell our cars eventually. Ed was awfully good about that, he never complained or protested. If I told him I owed Dr. MacVeaney thirty dollars, or that I had no money for the next coal delivery, or when they turned the gas and electric off because we hadn't paid the bill—it was lucky Ed knew how to turn it back on or we would have been cold and hungry often in those years—he would just say “I'd better sell the car,” and he would. There was never a lack of buyers. All the men who worked with Ed knew how good his cars were. Whenever he bought one, he would take it completely apart and put it back together again with all its parts cleaned and honed, running beautifully. Ed is fussy about cars. So all the men wanted his old cars. He'd sell them for what he paid for them. It never occurred to him to charge more. It never occurred to me either.

But I liked having a car, it made my life easier. And then, there were things I wanted the girls to see. I'd ask Ed to drive us into Brooklyn and to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I'd point out to the girls the neighborhoods I used to live in. Even in those days the houses had already been razed. They were such slums, so awful. And I'd show them what the streets were like, dirty, filled with people, so terrifying. And I'd remind them how lucky they were to have a nice little house to live in, with their own yard. Then we'd drive to the Lower East Side, where it was even worse. The girls would fall very silent, especially Anastasia. I could hear her thinking. There were people and laundry hanging from the fire escapes, and so much noise, and soot…oh, god, I can hardly bear even thinking about it.

And then, if no one had been sick, if I could afford it, we would drive into Jamaica on a Friday night after Ed got paid, and see a movie. I took them to movies they would like—Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, or Deanna Durbin. It was a treat for all of us. But then my heart would wrench to see Anastasia afterward, when other people were going into Jahn's for ice cream, and we couldn't, and she wouldn't ask, she'd just look, and my heart would break.

Such an odd child to have come from me. The way she makes her own places. In the summers, she carts out piles of old bedspreads and drapes I store in the big trunk in the girls' closet—you never know when they might be useful—and makes herself a tent in the backyard. She drapes one end of things over the porch railing, and the other over the hedge—the shape
is
rather like a tent, actually. And she drags my beach chair in there and carries out the piano stool—it's heavy—for a table, and lolls on the beach chair reading, books and lemonade on the piano stool beside her. She tells me she's a Persian princess. I can never figure out what's going on inside her. But I love fixing her a glass of lemonade or iced tea. I chip bits of ice from the block in the icebox, and I send her out to pick some mint from the garden, and I squeeze the lemons, and make a big pitcher of tea or lemonade. I like it myself.

I like the summer. I sit outside on the back steps shelling peas or stringing beans. Sometimes Anastasia helps me. It's so peaceful sitting there, quiet, the air so soft, still light even though it's nearing dinnertime. And Joy is out playing, and I know she's all right, she's such a happy kid, not like Anastasia. She's at the Callahans' this afternoon, I can see her over there in their yard. Mr. Callahan loves her. He's supposed to be a drug addict, but he's certainly very nice to Joy. He bought her a cowboy suit—chaps, shirt, hat, everything. His own children have nothing like that. He loves Joy.

Sitting with Mommy shelling peas or stringing beans, I love that, we sit in the quiet afternoon together and I can feel that Mommy likes me, likes sitting together working. I don't even mind shelling the peas or stringing the beans because I can feel Mommy is almost happy. One night after dinner, it was very hot and all of us sat out here on the back steps together, and it felt like a family, it was happy. And Mr. Dentel called over from their back steps, where he and his wife were sitting too, and said he was making ice cream and would we like some. He has a machine that you churn and it makes ice cream that's better than what you can buy in the store. And Daddy asked Mommy, and Mommy said that would be lovely, and Daddy went to their yard and scooped some out into dishes for us, and it was peach, and it was delicious. We sat there until it got dark, the fireflies sparking, the crickets chirping, and all the birds fell silent.

Sometimes in summer when the Bungalow Bar truck drives round, I get a dime and buy two orange ice pops with vanilla ice cream inside for Joy and me. But that ice cream isn't as good as Mr. Dentel's. I wish we had an ice-cream maker. I like the summer better than the winter, but in the winter sometimes I build an igloo. Joy helps me if she isn't sick: we pile snow in a circle, and keep piling it up and up to make walls. The hard part is to curve it in and make a roof. Lots of times after you get the snow packed down and curving, it just breaks off and falls, and you have to start over again. Joy giggles when that happens, but I don't see anything funny about it. Joy always gets bored and runs off, but I keep trying, and eventually it works. Then I like to build a fire inside the igloo. I'd like to sit inside it and read by the firelight. I tried it once. Mommy let me have newspaper and some kindling from the basement, and matches, and Joy was so excited she called all her friends, and they all tried to crowd into the igloo, but it was too small, so most of them had to stand outside. And I built the fire and Joy and I sat down next to it. But it was really cold, even with the fire, and my behind got freezing. It was too cold to read. I wonder what the Eskimos do. Maybe they sit on skins. Are there whaleskins? Or maybe, seal. But maybe the Eskimos don't read books.

I don't like it when it's cold. And in winter I have to go to school. I hate school. It's boring, and none of the children like me. Mommy said they're all jealous because I'm so smart, but I don't think that's it. I think it's because I'm so much younger than they are. They think I'm con-ceited. Conceited. I guess I am, but I can't help it. Some days I just can't bear to go to school and I tell Mommy I have a stomachache, and she lets me stay in bed all day. I don't even have to get dressed. I go down and get the little radio and fetch the chair from Mommy and Daddy's room and put it beside my bed, and put the radio on it, and listen to “Our Gal Sunday” and “Backstage Wife” and Mrs. Goldberg, and cut out paper dolls if I have new ones, or make them. I have lots and lots of nice pads Uncle Eddie brings down from Boston every Christmas. Only the paper is so heavy that the doll clothes I draw on them fall off the paper dolls I make, no matter how long I make the tabs. I wish I had a nice paint set, or those colored pencils that you can wet and make the color look all smooth.

But I love the paper dolls I buy in the five-and-ten. I have a set that look like Rita Hayworth, and a set that look like Ginger Rogers, and some of them don't look like anybody, just very pretty ladies. But all of them have gorgeous clothes, suits with fur collars, and dresses draped and pleated, and evening gowns. Joy says “evening gownds,” no matter how often I correct her. She says “nightgownd,” too. And “seggideggi,” for spaghetti. She's funny. She can't say “doorknob.” She says “nordob.” She's cute. When we're both sick, we play store. She sits in her bed and I sit in mine, and I get out all my paper dolls. She always argues, but I always win, because it's only fair, they're my paper dolls. So she gets the hats and pocketbooks and shoes and I get the dresses and suits and coats and evening gownds. And we each get half of the dolls, and the dolls go shopping, and we're the salesladies, and we help them to pick out nice outfits. Of course, it isn't really that good because only the clothes that came with them fit any of the dolls, but we pretend they can wear any of them, and sometimes, if Joy likes a dress a lot, she'll buy it for her doll even though it doesn't fit her. We use Monopoly money. But after a while, that game gets boring.

And at night, Joy always wants to play radio, but that isn't really a game because I have to do everything. I tell her I get tired, and she promises she'll do things, but then she doesn't. The only thing she does is sing the jingle that opens the show, but even then she can't sing it without me because she can't remember how the song goes. So we sing the jingle together, and then I'm the announcer. Sometimes I do a singing show and sometimes I make up a story. But I have to do all the parts and I have to sing all the songs, and my throat gets tired. So lots of times, I won't play radio. Sometimes I teach her to sing in harmony—she sings the melody and I harmonize. But I only know a few songs: “Joy to the World,” “Now Is the Hour,” and “America the Beautiful.” It's hard to harmonize “America the Beautiful,” but I love it: “For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain.” It's pretty, not like “Oh, say can you see.” That's all about war. Joy always giggles when we sing “Joy to the World,” because she thinks they wrote it about her. She doesn't really understand, she's only five. I was nine on my last birthday, and next month, in May, I'll make my First Holy Communion. But that doesn't make you grown up, because all the other girls in my religious instruction classes are little.

The other thing I like to do is swing on my swing. Daddy put it up and it's very strong and secure, Mommy came out to look at it when he hung it up and she said so. I can swing very high on it. I recite Robert Louis Stevenson's poem “The Swing” while I'm swinging, and try to pretend I can see far off into the horizon, a patchwork of little square farms like the ones in the picture. But all there really is is an empty lot with a dusty square in the middle where the boys play baseball; beyond that is a high school, I don't know its name. Sometimes when I'm swinging, the DiNapoli boys go up on top of the roof of their garage, where they have a pigeon coop, and play with their pigeons. They send them out to fly, and I try to fly as high as they do. Only in imagination, of course. I wish I could fly. I fly in my dreams all the time, but there it isn't fun, because I'm trying to escape from bad people who are chasing me, and I can't ever get high enough to escape. Those are nightmares, I wake up shivering. Sometimes I run into Mommy's room, but she doesn't like me to wake her up. She's tired. She's tired a lot, because her life is hard. That's why she's always in a bad mood.

One afternoon when Mommy was in an especially bad mood, Anastasia had her cookies and milk, and went right upstairs to change her clothes, and lay down on the bed to read a new book from the school library. She was deeply immersed when Mommy called her. Anastasia raised her head reluctantly, a little dizzy. She read so much, so fast, that often she would feel a little sick when she put her book aside. And these days, she wanted to do nothing else but read. She would go down for dinner and leave the table as quickly as she could, to run back upstairs and read some more. She would have liked to read during dinner, but Mommy wouldn't permit that.

She went to the head of the stairs. “What?”

“Don't say
what
that way, Anastasia. Come downstairs.”

She went down lingeringly. “What?” she asked again, and her mother grimaced.

“I want you to run up to the bus stop and meet Daddy. Ask him to give you a quarter. Then run to the grocer and get a package of Mueller's spaghetti, number eight, and then go next door to the butcher and get fifteen cents' worth of chop meat.”

Spaghetti and meatballs: ummm. Anastasia's mouth watered. But she didn't want to go to the store. She wanted to read.

“Why can't you just wait until he gets home, and I'll go to the store then?” she complained.

“Because Daddy likes to have dinner ready as soon as he gets home.”

“Well, it won't be anyway,” Anastasia pointed out, and Belle raised her eyebrows and turned away. Anastasia knew that despite her mother's grimace, she, Anastasia, was right; on the other hand, she also knew that if she argued any further, Mommy would put on her jacket and go up and meet Daddy herself and go to the store herself and then come home and make dinner and be grouchy and not speak to Anastasia for the next few days. So she got her jacket sulkily and left the house.

It was a wonderfully fresh spring evening, and she had been inside the house all afternoon. She breathed in the air deeply, and was delighted at the tiny balls of green dotting all the spare branches. Like embroidery, she thought, little knots of green stitched on the brown. And in a few of the front yards, she saw shoots of green poking through the earth.

She trudged up the three long blocks that she hated. She didn't know why she hated them. She hated to walk. She would have liked to skate, or jump rope down the street. She arrived at the corner of 123
^rd
Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard, but the bus wasn't there. She stood uneasily in front of O'Malley's Bar and Grill: Saloon, pondering those words. What was a bar? a grill? a saloon? She had peered inside the place and knew it smelled awful. It had little swinging doors, and sawdust on a wood floor and it smelled sour. Often, shabby men came out of there carrying big pails of sloshy foamy beer.