The Book Borrower (3 page)

—What does she look like?

—Medium-sized breasts. Well, medium large, but she's nursing. And pregnant.

—Breasts aren't all I—

—She wears sandals. She looks like an adult. She has fluffy light hair and big arms full of daughters.

—Breasts make me think about your breasts, said Harry.

—They're too tender and sore.

—I don't want to touch them, just to see them.

—You see them constantly. I nurse this kid all day.

—Could you take off your shirt and your bra and walk around a little?

—I'm not wearing a bra. Can't you tell? She shrugged off her shirt and cooked supper, scared she'd spatter something hot on her breasts. But she liked his look, his quiet.

Deborah in maternity clothes, two weeks later, made Ruben want another baby. Ruben had worn peasant smocks with embroidered trim, but Deborah went in for classy gray tunics she wore to the park with straight skirts and panty hose. Pregnancy makes me want to dress up, said Deborah. I don't know why. It's a nine-month festival.

—Shall we have another one? Ruben asked Harry.

—I love Peter, said Harry, a small man with wrinkles in his forehead, more wrinkles when he was happy. Now he wrinkled up like an old man, watching her cook, in her shirt this time. Sure, another Peter.

—Probably we should think of a different name.

—Peter II.

—Vole. Squirrel and Vole.

—Vole is good, said Harry. More than half the time, when she said something, Harry understood. Possibly seventy percent for jokes, and he generally knew the size of a joke, didn't look around for more. But the baby is hard, he said. You said you didn't want another one.

—He's hard.

Squirrel often cried. Her nipples were leather. She nursed him on the toilet seat, once in the bathtub but she was afraid she'd drop him—no, afraid she'd stick him under on purpose. He's hard, she said, but I want another one.

Deborah was at ease with babies on all sides of her.

The phone rang and it was Deborah. Again it was Deborah, even on Saturday morning while they had breakfast. Ruben felt that swirl in the throat, as when the teacher said hers was the best; and she was also troubled.

—What does she want with you? said Harry.

—Want with me! In moments she was in tears.

Then a fight. You can be friends with whoever you want, said Harry. I do
not
claim every bit of your attention, I do
not
claim all your time, you want to be friends with this Deborah, be friends, I don't care. If anybody is having second thoughts it's you, not me.

Apologies.

Sex. Nipples so sore she didn't want him to lie on her, so they did it dog style, but she felt ugly, her breasts hanging low.

—Maybe I
am
jealous, he said.

On Monday, Deborah called for Ruben on the way to the park, but Ruben wasn't ready.

—What do you have to do?

—Vacuum the rug. They stood at the door, Deborah in mustard color, a new maternity dress, her little girls beside her. Ruben didn't ask Deborah in.

—You'd give up time with me to vacuum the rug?

The dismal rug, in midafternoon, when Squirrel wouldn't stop crying .. . If she didn't do it first thing, later it looked like something put into a movie to show that the characters have spoiled their lives.

—I didn't think you were like that, said Deborah.

Ruben said, I'll meet you in the park in ten minutes. She wanted to pee, too. She wanted to change Squirrel. She didn't want to be hurried. But she didn't vacuum the rug. She changed the baby, but when she saw his cap on the shelf she took it because the day was sunny. Under the cap was the book Deborah had lent her. She had forgotten. She didn't ease the carriage down the porch steps, bumping it, hand on the baby's back, as she usually did. She sat down on the top step and began to read. When Squirrel cried, she nursed him while reading, his smooth, light brown efficient head at her breast, her shirt bunched around his head. Deborah always wore a heavy bra whose straps slipped down her bare shoulders, but Ruben, again, had no bra on; not a political gesture exactly (small breasts, easier to nurse), but almost a political gesture.

As usual there was crud on her glasses. She cleaned them with a wet finger and read through streaks.

 

 

My father worked in a ladies' clothing factory, basting in place the collars and cuffs of expensive dresses; then they were sewn by women on machines. He peered as if light hurt and it was painful to take a good look at things. His eyes were red, rheumy, and ugly, with red veins in the whites. When he was young he had read anarchist theory, but as an old man he couldn't read easily and he stared all day at the newspaper.

My mother was brave, but expressed her courage as con-tempt. Nothing impressed her, everyone was out to cheat her, everyone was her enemy. Stupid irony was her chief means of communication—not clever irony. Only Sarah, the youngest, broke through Mama's disdain. I think after Sarah was born my mother refused sex with my father. Maybe, having given my father a great big no, my mother felt better about children, and enjoyed Sarah.

Several nights a week when we were little, my father entertained men Jessie and I called the Screamers. They screamed mostly in Yiddish, staying until late at night, drinking tea or schnapps. I was convinced that they were bandits. It seemed impossible that they could be invited guests, they made every-body so unhappy. I must have been eight or ten when I first asked Jessie whether she thought the police might be helpful in getting rid of them.

“The police!” she said. “We don't have anything to do with the police!”

“Why not?” My teacher had said we should consult a policeman if we got lost. Like everyone who wasn't an immi-grant, policemen had the wrong smell, as I put it to myself, but I wasn't afraid of them. Jessie began an explanation that was far beyond me. I have no idea how she'd learned all she told me: police were bad, the men who visited Papa were good, Papa wanted their visits, she would have liked to be allowed to stay up and listen. The men were planning a better time, she said, when there wouldn't be suffering and poverty, when everybody would have enough money because people would share equally. It was spring, and we were walking home from the market, where Mama had sent us to buy potatoes. The potatoes were in a bag Mama usually carried, and now Jessie carried it. She spoke in a low voice and looked around her, bending her head seriously. For years I connected radical political ideas with potatoes. I thought I had made the connection from seeing a print, somewhere, of van Gogh's potato eaters—people presumably in need of such ideas. But one day, crying on the naked shoulder of a bored lover, I told the story of the walk in the spring, the warmth and the light wind and the new leaves and the potatoes, and I realized where the connection in my mind had come from.

I don't remember Jessie reading the kind of heavy tome I associate with political theory, but certainly there were anarchist newsletters and papers in the house. Once Jessie persuaded Mama to give her some food for a beggar. Mama finally filled a bag with bread and an apple, then—I think I remember—she spat into it. Could she have done that? I certainly remember Jessie carrying the bag to the door and handing it to a ragged man who waited there. The man turned and in profile I saw him take an enormous bite out of the apple. I never asked my mother if she'd really spat. Spitting was different then, an expressive activity, a major health problem. Signs read “No Spitting.” What happened to those signs? Did more people spit in the old days than now? Where did the old ones get so much saliva?

Sometimes Jessie was my best friend and sometimes she ignored me and left me to play with Sarah. Sarah was prettier than we were, but not bright. She adored me, which was flattering, but I quickly grew bored with her. I knew my proper companion was Jessie.

Jessie and my father shared political ideas but disagreed constantly. As she grew he took to screaming at her, accusing her—oddly for an anarchist—of sexual crimes: whoredom, promiscuity. He blamed her for having big breasts, as if she'd grown them on purpose to attract the attention of men. In a household full of women, a man must dream about breasts and wake in agonized sweat if the women are mostly his daughters. And what if his wife has rejected him? Sarah, in time, had big breasts as well, and mine were not tiny.

By telling Jessie over and over again that he believed she had a sexual life, my father must have given her a kind of permission to consider having one. Or maybe the talk of free love in the anarchist meetings affected Jessie. You talk about it long enough, you need to do it. From the age of twelve, my sister sat in on the meetings, which were sometimes held in restaurants and union halls, sometimes at our house. From the time she was fourteen or fifteen, men—not boys—were asking her to run errands or deliver messages for them.

I came to understand that sometimes Jessie went with one or another of these men and “did things,” in bed or else-where. Probably rarely in an actual bed. I think that at first I imagined these scenes; later Jessie told me. She had nobody else to tell, of course, not darling stupid Sarah, and certainly not our parents. What amazed me was that Jessie loved sex. I knew about sex, somehow, although certainly my mother hadn't told me, but of course I thought it must be horrid. Jessie told me sex was delectable. She told me how to masturbate.

So I will describe something I do know about, though of course I wasn't there: the night Jessie lost her virginity. She was in love. She was in love with a printer in his thirties named William Platz. He had stolen the key to the print shop where he worked, and at night sometimes he returned there and printed leaflets and pamphlets for the anarchists. Some-times Jessie helped him. One cold night they were walking from the shop to the union hall, their arms laden with pamphlets on which the ink was not quite dry and had a pungent smell. After a silence, William Platz asked Jessie solemnly if she were a virgin.

“Naturally,” said Jessie.

“And do you, like me, believe that men and women should be free to follow their impulses in these matters?”

Jessie had never put such an idea into words, but, having grown up in our household, was somewhat lawless in many ways. She didn't blush.

I said, when she told me about it, “You didn't feel modest or frightened?”

“No, I was happy. I'd loved him for a while, and I didn't know what we'd do if he loved me back, because he was married.”

“Will you come with me now?” William Platz had said. She was going with him anyway, to stow the pamphlets in the empty hall, but she understood. On the way, he went into a bakery that baked bread late into the night. Jessie waited outside in the cold and William Platz came out with a big round loaf. He tore off pieces and fed them to her.

“Big pieces or small pieces?” I asked. Big would mean fierce passion and small would mean tender love.

“Small pieces,” she said. They made love on William's coat, which he spread on the floor in an upstairs room of the union hall. It was cold; a stove was nearby but it was unlit. Jessie was afraid of rolling over in passion and hitting her head on the cold stove.

William Platz left her not long after, though, and that's how she came to tell me the story.

“Why didn't you tell me right away?” I said. “Were you ashamed?”

“I almost told you, because I was sore,” she said. “But I didn't think you'd know a remedy.” William Platz dropped Jessie as a lover, but they remained political associates. I didn't see how that was possible but my sister shrugged.

By November 1920 Jessie was eighteen and had moved out of our apartment long since, which infuriated my father because she was working as a clerk at the mill and as long as she lived in the house he confiscated her wages. Jessie didn't graduate from high school; she'd gotten this job when she turned sixteen. When I graduated and got my own job I minded handing my money over to my father, but not as much as Jessie had. All day I'd sew decorations on hats and be polite to ladies, wanting to crush the hats and be rude to the customers, and on the way home at the end of the week, with my money, I tried to convince myself that it would buy a loaf of bread for Sarah, a dress for Sarah, whom I loved.