The UnAmericans: Stories (16 page)

So I lied.

“Every Sunday afternoon, I’d bundle you up in a knit blanket and wheel you down Táboritská Street. I’d park your stroller outside Ivan’s flat and stare at you, completely flummoxed. The first time you opened your eyes and focused: it was on me.” The warm afternoon was all around us; in the distance I could hear the calls of the gulls. “Inside Ivan’s kitchen we’d all take turns passing you around. But I loved it when you came back to me. You were so good—you never made a sound. It was like you knew how dangerous a cry could be in that room. I’d put down my pen and whisper the same song my mother did when I was a baby. Tichá Malá Panenka. And you were. You were my silent little doll.”

I knew the second Katka saw any of this onstage it would all be over, but I couldn’t think about that now. Because for this moment Daniela looked as if she believed every word. Or probably just wanted to badly enough. Her gaze was fixed and wide, as if she were watching television. I couldn’t tell which of us had scooted closer or if we’d done it simultaneously. But she was so near our elbows were almost touching, and as I continued to talk, I wondered if any of what I was saying would begin to feel like the truth. It didn’t yet, but I was just getting started.

The day outside is hazy
and gray; the fan on the counter blows dust. Jell-O spins slowly in a glass case. The radio, always a notch too loud for my taste, is turned up even higher for news hour. British troops have left Egypt, the Army-McCarthy Hearings are in full swing and the man who invented the zipper has dropped dead.

“Can’t you see table six flagging you down?” Alan asks. “You think people like cold coffee?” Alan Mandlebaum. Always behind me ever since we were kids, always watching.

I pick up the coffeepot and move down the aisle of customers. The regulars are at the counter, talking about Roger Maris, as if they’d been the ones up to bat—as if they’d never left the Bronx for Los Angeles. Beside them are their wives: distracted, knitting, fat leather pocketbooks on their laps. And there’s my father, in a red vinyl booth near the back. His head is bent over his lunch, so all I can see are newspaper-stained fingers gripping a turkey melt, even though it’s Tuesday afternoon and he’s promised to go out and look for a job.

H
OME IS
a pale green duplex dropped onto a patch of dry lawn. My father and the guys are inside, squeezed into our tiny living room and scooping up fistfuls of pistachios from a bowl on the table.

“You heard about Murray Hirsch?” My father’s voice is low, but the way he speaks makes every word sound absolute. “They got him this morning, right in his own yard. Didn’t even let his wife take the kids inside.” The guys groan, setting empty beers on the table. My father eyes the bottles, my cue to bring in fresh ones from the icebox. If I stall a minute he’ll start to fidget and look around the room, so I’m in the kitchen before he can start.

On our kitchen table is a seashell-pink cloth, dotted with daisies. My mother made it years ago, before she got sick. I was five when she died, and a few years later I had the brains to fold up the tablecloth and stick it in a closet: it makes no sense to stare at another person’s things if they’re never going to come back. But when I removed the cloth it was somehow still there, and you could tell how old the table was without it, so I put it back on again.

“Judy,” Lou Mandlebaum says now, leaning in the doorway. “Hope all this business with Murray doesn’t make you nervous.” He winks. I’ve got a feeling Alan will look just like his father later in life, eyes round as fishbowls, elbows and knuckles overshadowing the rest of him. Lou and my father met years ago, before Lou took over Menick’s restaurant, even before we all moved out west. Both jailed for organizing cells at the textile plant where they worked, they were best friends by the time bail came through. My father and Lou love to moon over what a match Alan and I will make (In the same tenth-grade class! From the same ilk!); we’ve practically been engaged since birth. But you want to know what
I
see in a future with Alan? I see decade after decade living under Menick’s yellow lights in a housedress, flowered or checked, with rickrack along the hem, serving soup and saltines to old-timers still complaining about their backs and the heat and the lies of the press.

“We’re parched in here!” my father calls from the living room.

I pull the bottles from the icebox and hand them to Lou. “You hear that?” I say. “The king has spoken.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, after the guys have gone home and the dinner dishes are washed and drying on the counter, the two men arrive. Their visits have become the most predictable thing in my life. Always outside on the concrete steps, wearing stiff brown suits. My father in the doorway, yelling that this is
his
house and they’re invading his privacy. Don’t they understand he has rights? He can cite them, do they want to hear? Then the whack of the front door and my father joins them on the lawn. The low hum of the men’s voices, my father’s rising higher, but still not loud enough for me to make out actual words. I can see it all through the bathroom window from where I stand tiptoed on the edge of the tub. Moonlight shines on the lawn, giving my father a bluish satiny glow that makes him look almost heroic.

My father joined the Party during the Depression, just another unemployed factory worker looking, as he’s told me a million times, for “a model that actually worked.” He’s been deep inside it since I was so young I can’t tell now what’s a real memory and what I’ve invented by staring at photographs too long, trying to fill in the parts the camera didn’t catch. Here’s what I do remember, real or imagined: Our apartment in the Bronx, always loud and always crowded, the other families from the building coming in and out so often I never knew who had a key. Snow-caked boots by our front door and our broken fireplace, its mantel cluttered with portraits of black-bearded, stern-eyed ancestors my father never talked about. Summer weekends upstate at the bungalow colony, Alan whining about the sun and the bugs and the lumpy mattresses, too afraid of the dock spiders to ever swim out past his knees. I remember women from the Party caring for my mother for years, coming in with baskets of clean laundry and empty cereal boxes for me to use as blocks. My father—no joke—patiently following Party women’s instructions: heating up a casserole in the oven, softly rapping on my mother’s door with a jelly jar of water. My mother in bed the entire time I knew her, long slim fingers like she should have played piano, her light hair spinning out elegantly against the bleached sheets.

The war ended when I was six and everyone I knew moved to California, replicating our east coast shtetl in stucco duplexes painted optimistic pastels, fenced in by manzanita bushes and baby palms. “Remember the Bronx?” my father loves to say to anyone who will listen. “Men shuffling from home to work and back to their dark, tiny apartments. So poor everyone used towels for curtains. And the winters!” Then he always laughs, crossing his suntanned arms with satisfaction.

Here’s how it’s been since we came out west: my father gets work, the FBI visits his job and leans on his boss, I walk home from school and find my father on the sofa in his undershirt and slippers in the middle of the day with the radio wailing through the walls, and all over again. I’m the only one working this summer, my tips and paychecks barely keeping us afloat. I know my father will get a job when school starts up again for me in the fall—
finding
one has never been the problem—but he’s spent the entire summer lazing around Menick’s or in meetings with the guys. He does everything but actually look for employment, though he’s always lecturing me on the importance of honest work and how much pride I should take in being blue-collar, especially with Trumbo and all the others still being talked about, as if he’s afraid everyone will think all the communists in L.A. have mansions and glossy cars and swimming cabanas. Whenever I ask why he cares what people think, he gets a funny look in his eyes and stands up straighter, like he’s about to deliver a speech, and says it sends the world the wrong message. But personally I think his rivalry with the Hollywood liberals is one-sided, the skinny schoolboy waging a silent war against the homecoming king who has no idea the kid exists, and sometimes after a double shift at Menick’s, I want to fling one of those laminated menus right at him and tell him I for one don’t need a lecture on the value of hard work.

My father’s forever telling me not to worry about his activities, that he and Lou have perfected the craft of organizing since their run-in with the cops so long ago, and I try my hardest to believe him. But lately our house has felt cramped with secrets, as though his politics will seep out the windows if we aren’t careful. He and Lou have been worried that someone’s setting them up. They go quiet when I’m around, but I know what they’re talking about: on the last two worker walkouts they organized, someone broke windows at the plant and destroyed the equipment. They’re certain there isn’t a fink in the group—they’ve known each other forever—but anyone who hates their politics could be vandalizing the property, then trying to pin the crime on them. My father thinks he’s so good at keeping things from me, but I can hear them murmuring and want to tell them not to worry—I know not to leak. The rules have been drilled into me since I was a girl: Never tell a soul what goes on in the living room meetings. Don’t forget that everyone can hear what you say on the party line, and that the phone is definitely tapped. Stay away from people, from boys, who aren’t involved in the movement—they can’t be trusted.

Before school let out for summer, the air-raid drills began in homeroom. If we saw a flash, my teacher said, and then the sky went blank and we heard a terrible noise, we were to crouch under our desks until we were told it was safe to come out. Then duck and cover, he said, sliding his chalky fingers into his pockets. Remember those words.

“What a load of malarkey,” was what my father said when I told him about the drills. He was always telling me the Russians were Ike’s enemy, not ours, and the authority in his voice made me know he was right.

What I didn’t tell him was that the drills had quickly become the part of school I liked most: the hushed, cramped feeling of crouching under my desk, the clack of my teacher’s wingtips as he paced the classroom, giving instructions. Now shut your eyes, he said, and keep your hands over your ears at all times. When I closed my eyes, I saw clots of light shaped like cherry pits and plums. After a minute my eyes settled into the darkness and I saw nothing at all.