Her Mother's Daughter (56 page)

So began six months of househunting. They drove out in the shiny sleek old car, every Sunday, to different towns on Long Island. They looked at houses in Huntington, Douglaston, Hempstead, Freeport, and Rockville Centre. And each Sunday they had dinner out in a nice restaurant. Anastasia did not understand how they could suddenly afford this, or why it happened, but she enjoyed it. So did Belle, who oversaw the children's dress with great care each Sunday.

And while they were looking, Belle made the decision to change their name. They had often discussed it, she and Ed. It was déclassé to be Polish, and especially to have such a foreign name. But Ed had feared upsetting his father. But Dafna had died some years ago, after a long undiagnosed illness; and Stefan, despondent after her death, had followed her two years later. So, there was nothing to stop them now. And Belle did not want to enter the new neighborhood with their present name.

“Poor Daddy suffers so,” she explained to Anastasia. “In his plant, they call the men over the loudspeaker, and they always mispronounce his name. He gets called Dabooski and Dalouski and things like that. It upsets him.” Belle and Ed spent many evenings considering new names, and finally decided on Stevens, after Stefan. It sounded English, which was what Belle wanted to be.

The truth was, she was more English than Polish. She liked subdued simple clothes, in browns and blacks and tans; and bland boiled food; and the English style of home decoration. The women she would most admire in her life, except for Gertrude Grunbacher, were all of English extraction—Ann Gwyn, Mildred Bradshaw, and Martha Thacker. She liked their understated speech and manners, their avoidance of the emotional, their personal reticence. If she had met any Englishy people when she was young, you might have thought she modeled herself on them. When Anastasia pointed out that the name was Englishy, and so was her mother, Belle was pleased.

But English name or not, soon after they moved into their new house in Rockville Centre, at the end of August 1944, Anastasia knew that they would not pass muster. Even the neat white frame colonial house could not disguise them. Disguise took money. Nothing could disguise their ridiculous-looking old car. In South Ozone Park, they had been viewed as rich because they had a car at all; but in Rockville Centre, the 1928 Graham-Paige was laughable among all the prewar but still snappy Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and Buicks. And while Belle rarely went anywhere except to the market or the dry cleaner, Anastasia was almost immediately invited into the houses of her new girlfriends. The difference was striking. For her friends' houses had maids in them, and gardeners taking care of the lawns. Inside there were wall-to-wall carpeting and lush couches, with ornate little side chairs, knickknacks everywhere, formal dining rooms furnished in imitation Sheraton. Some of the houses had little rooms just for the telephone; her friends had bedrooms furnished in antiqued white, with canopies over their beds, and matching vanity table skirts. The wealthiest threw their clothes in a heap after wearing for the maid to pick up. Many had collections of stuffed animals in the corners of their rooms.

Anastasia would sniff with contempt: I wouldn't want such things, she'd decide, then catch herself. You can't be sure you wouldn't want a thing until you have the chance to have it. Only then do you really know. And anyway, not all the girls were so rich, although all of those who weren't envied those who were. All except the “tramps.” There were a number of these in the school, and Anastasia made friends with several of them. The school was divided into groups: there were two cliques, the Christian one and the Jewish one; then there were the drips; and the tramps. Anastasia knew she was destined to be a drip. The new school was dismaying.

In John Adams, she had studied musical technique and harmony; this school had no such courses. In John Adams, she had been a member of a group that went to Saturday-morning rehearsals of the symphony, and to plays. In her sophomore year there, she had seen Katharine Cornell in
Antony and Cleopatra,
Paul Robeson in
Othello,
and Maurice Evans in
Hamlet.
In this school, the rich boys owned cars and the clique (the Christian clique) went out on Friday and Saturday nights to roadhouses and bars, and got drunk, and trashed the bars or cracked up their cars. The girls owned cashmere sweaters, and were rated according to how many they possessed. And worst of all,
all
the kids acted as if they and their school were superior to all others.

All the wealthy girls belonged to one clique or another. The Jewish girls wore soberer clothes than the Christian ones, and they were allowed to be smart and get good grades. If you were a Christian and got good grades, you were a little suspect, and likely to be classified as a drip. But both cliques contained some girls who were not wealthy, but who had some special trait—charm, lovableness, or very good looks. Any girl who was popular with boys could be in a clique except the tramps; you
knew
(how?) that the boys took the tramps out, but they never spoke to them openly or took them to school functions. But when Anastasia came to know the tramps, she found them the sweetest of any of the girls. They were invariably poor, and came often from homes where they were abused. They were in some way more grown up than the other girls. They seemed a little sad, but very kind, generous. One of the tramps, a girl named Sally, would ask Anastasia to come home with her almost every afternoon. She seemed very sophisticated to Anastasia. She lived on the wrong side of town, in a tiny house. There was never anyone home, and Sally seemed to tiptoe through the small shabby rooms. She'd get two Cokes from the fridge, then take Anastasia up to her room, and they would sit beside the dormer window that lighted it, and talk. But Anastasia never had anything to say, she would mainly listen, and Sally just talked desultorily. She didn't say much, but she hinted at things. Anastasia was silenced by what she felt as something tragic in Sally or her life. After a few weeks, she stopped going. Sally didn't reproach her, and always smiled when she saw her afterward.

In her two years at the high school, Anastasia became friendly with a few members of each group, but she was never an insider, and always felt that. At the time, and even later, she did not comprehend what made one an insider. Wherever she was, whatever she did—whether she was going to the movies and out for a Coke with a group of the “drips,” or sitting in her own backyard with one of the “tramps,” or providing company for one of the Christian clique as she baby-sat, or working on the school newspaper with one of the Jewish clique—she felt she was wrong, outside, and must tread with care.

It was in the two years she spent in this unhappy environment that Anastasia formed, not her character, but her persona. She determined not to be trapped by their categories, and violated them all. She had no money for clothes, so dressed simply, like the “drips”; but she wore her hair wild, and smoked with the boys in the parking lot at lunch hour. Even the “tramps” didn't do that. She got good enough grades to be respected by the Jewish clique, but argued and contested with her teachers in class. She told everyone she was going to be an artist, and treated the shabby art classes with contempt. She wrote a term paper arguing that “miscegenation” was perfectly all right, and paraded the B her shocked and horrified teacher had been forced to award her. She joined a campaign started by a boy in her class, to survey the black—then called colored—part of town and find out why there was only one black child in the high school, Alice Boston, who was wary and timid, and spoke to no one. Where were all the others? Rockville Centre had a large black neighborhood, drawn there by their work as servants in the richer houses. She wrote a little story about her childhood that was published in the school newspaper (this high school had no magazine). She described a black family moving into their block in South Ozone Park. They were apparently placed there by the Welfare Department—the house had been empty for a long time. The family had two children, and Belle had insisted that Anastasia and Joy go down to their house and knock on the door and ask if the children could come out to play. Joy was perfectly willing, but shy Anastasia had to be prodded. Belle explained that because they were black, many people disliked them, and none of the other children would play with them. This persuaded Anastasia, and down the two sisters went. A worn, thin, still-young light brown woman came to the door and opened it a crack. The children, together, piped their request. The woman said abruptly that her children could not come out. She closed the door.

A month later, the family disappeared.

This seemingly pointless story—for Anastasia had not made any point, had not felt up to writing about black fear of whites—won her no friends in her new school, except for one teacher, Mrs. Sherman, who taught English and was, Anastasia thought, the most intelligent of the teachers. The story accomplished one thing: it consolidated Anastasia's position as an outsider.

Belle did not notice Anastasia reeling from the shock of this new environment. The child was out all the time, she had friends, her grades were all right, if not superb, as they had been before. And Joy seemed truly happy, having to walk only a few blocks to the pretty Hewlett school, and having almost immediately been embraced by its sixth-grade clique. Belle herself was consumed with worry and plans.

To buy the house, they had had to sell both Ed's small insurance policies, and the policies she'd taken for the girls' education. She asked Anastasia's permission to sell hers, which was fervently granted. Anastasia had always hated the neighborhood they lived in; she was eager to move. They were fortunate that the builder of the house, a man who appeared as solid and honest as the houses he built, had agreed to hold the mortgage on it. This meant they could pay only the interest, which came to about as much as they had paid in rent in the old house. But now Belle could not work in Gertz anymore. Travel there and back would be so expensive and time-consuming as to devour most of her wages. And she could not work on Long Island unless she could drive.

She asked Ed to give her driving lessons, and she got her license, but she never felt safe driving a car, and she drove slowly and uncertainly. She tried to drive only locally: like all the other ladies in the neighborhood, she went with her husband to the station every morning and drove the car back, then drove to the station in the evening to meet him. She drove to the supermarkets, the dry cleaners, and occasionally, dared the longer drive to Hempstead or Garden City, where the department stores were. She remained terrified to drive on the parkway, and for several years did not try.

She knew she should get another job. She was thrilled with her nice house, but it needed furniture badly. She couldn't even afford to buy curtains for all the windows. She had made the small side room off the living room her “porch.” It had five windows, so was bright, and was too small for most uses. It was the room in which—after the kitchen—she spent most of her time. The people who had lived in the house before them had left a nice little breakfast set in the breakfast nook, and someday when Ed had time, she would have him repaint it. But that allowed her to put their old kitchen table and chairs in the dining room. Ed had already painted them grey, and she had bought a cheap blue-grey rug for the room, but it still looked empty. So she had him paint Momma's old sewing machine cabinet grey, and she set it against the wall like a buffet.

But the living room was her pride. It was true, she had no end tables, no tables of any sort, but there were the fine Queen Anne couch and chair, and the high-backed chair with the wooden arms; there was the old imitation Persian rug; and there was her new piano, a Baldwin baby grand. When Hal Grunbacher was drafted, he urged her to buy a new piano. They were on sale, he said, and were no longer being made since the war. He would help her pick one out. It was a beautiful piano, and everyone said it had wonderful tone. And Hal's mother Gertrude, who had taught him to play, was now giving the girls their lessons. She drove all the way from Forest Hills to Rockville Centre, and charged only a dollar and a half for the lessons. Belle knew Mrs. Grunbacher thought Anastasia could be a professional pianist, if only she applied herself more. Still, where would they find the money to back such a career? She knew it took money. Hal had told them Anastasia could be a concert pianist, but that she had to have a special kind of education, spending five hours a day on music. Anastasia had said she didn't want to. That was all right. A career as a concert pianist was so hard. She played beautifully, which would help her find a man to marry, a big lawyer or a big doctor, someone who could give her a decent life.

The living room also held Sokolowski's painting in its broad gilt frame, in its place of honor over the couch, where it had hung in every house Belle had ever occupied. Belle knew that many of the houses in this neighborhood were very grand. But she loved this house. She was proud of it. She wished, oh how she wished that Momma could have seen it, that Momma could have seen her in it: My house, Momma. And Momma would have had to say, “Good, Bella.”

But upstairs, there were no rugs, and the furniture was sparse. There was no way they could buy more furniture unless Belle worked. It took everything Ed earned even when he worked overtime just to pay the bills. Still, she did not want to get in the car and drive over to Hempstead to the Franklin Shops and apply for a job as a saleslady. She was forty years old; she had worked all her life; she was tired. She wanted to sit in her lovely home and gaze out at the quiet streets and the trees, and not have to work. She wanted to welcome Gertrude Grunbacher every Thursday, and serve her coffee and cake while they waited for the girls to get home from school. She loved sitting in the garden, such a lovely garden, in the old Adirondack chair, for an hour in the afternoon, sipping iced coffee and smoking. Here she had finally got the house she dreamed of, her, a stupid Polaka from the slums. She wanted to be in it.