Women and Children First (13 page)

The first day of vacation she goes to the store and buys lots of food. After that she stays home. She decides not to call him. Instead she will make a list of things to remember to tell him, things that happen to her. Then she’ll have the list if he calls.

At the end of the week he still hasn’t called, so she decides to call
him
. She picks up the phone and as she dials, reads the list:

1. A flock of geese flew overhead and she thought it was barking dogs.

2. In the grocery store, she overheard one teenage mother telling another how, the first year after her kid was born, she rented a trailer from an old guy who had put an electronic bug zapper right outside her bedroom window. The purple light and the zapping kept waking up the baby. She kept turning the light off, but the landlord kept sneaking back over and turning it on, and finally they had an argument and he evicted her.

3. After that trip to the grocery store, she stopped going out, and spent the rest of her vacation in bed. She ate in bed, didn’t bathe, watched a lot of TV. Her favorite part of the day was the early morning, before she was fully awake. She would put her head under the covers, where it was warm and smelled of her body, and she breathed in the smell, with its edge of the zoo, a little bit like his smell.

She reads through the list again. She puts down the phone. She thinks: I have nothing to tell him that isn’t about animals.

A
NITA SAILS THE BABY
over her head. “Earth to Spaceship Bertie,” she says. “Earth to Spaceship Bertie. Can you read me?”

The baby’s laugh sounds forced, like Johnny Carson’s when he’s blown a joke. Last week she caught Bertie practicing smiles in the mirror over his crib, phony social smiles for the old ladies who goo-goo him in the street, noticeably different from his real smile. It occurs to her that the baby is embarrassed for her. Lately she’s often embarrassed for herself. This feeling takes her back fifteen years to her early teens, when she and her parents and her younger sister Lynne used to go places—Jones Beach, Prospect Park—and she’d see groups of kids her own age. At the time she had felt that being with her family made her horribly conspicuous; now she realizes that it probably made her invisible.

The house is quiet. Now since she’s back is the first time Anita can remember being in her parents’ home without the television going. She thinks of the years her father spent trailing her and Lynne from room to room, switching lights off behind them, asking who they thought was paying the electric bills. Yet he never turned the TV off; he’d fall asleep to the
Late Show
. Now the TV is dark, the house is lit up like a birthday cake, and her father is down in the finished basement, silenced by the acoustical ceiling as he claps his hands, leaps into the air, and sings hymns in praise of God and the Baal Shem Tov.

In the morning, when Anita’s father goes off to the
bet hamidrash
, the house of study, Anita and her mother and the baby watch
Donahue
. Today the panel is made up of parents whose children have run away and joined cults. The week Anita came home, there was a show about grown children moving back in with their parents. It reminds Anita of how in high school, and later when she used to take acid, the radio always seemed to play oddly appropriate songs. Hearing the Miracles sing “What’s So Good about Good-bye?” when she was breaking up with a boyfriend had made her feel connected with lovers breaking up everywhere. But now she hates to think that her life is one of those stories that make Donahue go all dewy-eyed with concern.

The twice-divorced mother of a Moonie is blaming everything on broken homes. “Don’t you ever become a Moonie,” Anita whispers, pressing her lips against the back of the baby’s neck. Another mother is describing how her daughter calls herself Prem Ananda, wears only orange clothes, has married a boy the guru’s chosen for her, and, with her doctorate in philosophy, works decorating cakes in the ashram bakery.

“Cakes?” says Anita’s mother. “That’s nothing. Only my Sam waits till he’s fifty-seven to join a cult. After thirty-three years of marriage, he’ll only make love through a hole in the sheet.”

“A hole in the sheet?” Repeating this, Anita imagines Donahue repeating it, then realizes: incredibly, she and her mother have never talked about sex. Not ever. Imagining her mother on Donahue, Anita sees only close-ups, because if the camera pulled back, it would see up her mother’s housedress to where the pale veined thighs dimple over the tops of her support hose.

Anita goes over and hugs her mother so hard that Bertie, squeezed between them, squawks like one of his bath toys. The baby starts to cry, her mother starts to cry, and Anita, not knowing what else to do, presses Bertie against her mother and pats and rubs them as if trying to burp both of them at once.

Anita takes nothing for granted. When she lifts her foot to take a step, she no longer trusts the ground to be there when she puts it down. She used to say that you could never really tell about people; now she knows it’s true. She never once doubted that Jamie loved her, that he wanted the baby. When he came to visit her and Bertie in the hospital and began crying, she was so sure it was from happiness that she literally did not hear him say he’d fallen in love with somebody else.

She’d made him repeat it till he was almost shouting and she remembered who this Lizzie was: another lawyer in his office. At a garden party that summer Lizzie had asked to touch Anita’s belly.

Just as Jamie was offering to move out of the house they had rented for its view, for their vision of children standing at the Victorian Bay window watching boats slip up the Hudson, a nurse wheeled the baby in, in a futuristic clear plastic cart.

“Spaceship Bertie,” said Jamie.

Anita’s sister Lynne says that men do this all the time: Jamie’s acting out his ambivalence about fatherhood, his jealousy of the mother-infant bond. This sounds to Anita like something from
Family Circle
or
Ladies’ Home Journal
. Lynne has read those magazines all her life, but now that she’s going for her master’s in women’s studies, she refers to it as “keeping up.” Lynne can’t believe that Anita never had the tiniest suspicion. A year ago, Anita would have said the same thing, but now she knows it’s possible. Whenever she thinks about last summer, she feels like a Kennedy-assassination buff examining the Zapruder film. But no matter how many times she rewinds it, frame by frame, she can’t see the smoking gun, the face at the warehouse window. All she sees is that suddenly, everyone in the car starts moving very strangely.

Anita’s mother believes her. Overnight,
her
husband turned into a born-again Hasid. Perhaps that’s why she hardly sounded surprised when on the day she and Anita’s father were supposed to drive up to Nyack to see the baby, Anita called to say that she and Bertie were coming to Brooklyn. Over the phone, her mother had warned her to expect changes. Daddy wasn’t himself. No, he wasn’t sick. Working too hard as usual, but otherwise fine. Her tone had suggested something shameful. Had he, too, fallen in love with somebody else?

Pulling into her parents’ driveway, Anita thought: He looks the same. He opened the door for her and waited while she unstrapped Bertie from his car seat, then sidestepped her embrace. He’d never been a comfortable hugger, but now she missed his pat-pat-pat. She held Bertie out to him; he shook his head.

“Bertie, this is your grandpa,” she said. “Grandpa, this is Bertie.”

“Has he been circumcised?” asked her father.

“Of course,” said Anita. “Are you kidding? My doctor did it in the hospital.”

“Then we’ll have to have it done again,” said her father. “By a mohel.”

“Again!” yelled Anita. “Are you out of your mind?”

Attracted by the noise, her mother came flying out of the house. “Sam!” She grabbed the baby from Anita. “Can’t you see she’s upset?”

The commotion had comforted Anita. Everything was familiar—their voices, the pressure of her mother’s plump shoulder pushing her into the house, the way she said, “Coffee?” before they’d even sat down.

“I’ll get it,” said Anita. “You hold the baby.” But her mother headed her off at the kitchen door.

“It’s arranged a little different now,” she explained. “Those dishes over there by the fridge are for meat. These here by the stove are for milk.”

That night they couldn’t eat till her father had blessed the half grapefruits, the maraschino cherries, the boiled flank steak, the potatoes and carrots, the horseradish, the unopened jar of applesauce, the kosher orange gelatin with sliced bananas. During the meal, Bertie began to fuss, and Anita guided his head up under her shirt.

“Is it all right if the baby drinks milk while I eat meat?” she asked. Her mother laughed.

“Edna,” said her father, “don’t encourage her.”

Bertie cried when Anita tried to set him down, so she was left alone with her father while her mother did the dishes.

“What
is
this?” she asked him. “You never went to
shul
in your life. Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Ron didn’t speak to us for a year because on the Saturday of Cousin Simon’s bar mitzvah, you
forgot
—you said—and took us all to Rip Van Winkle’s Storybook Village.”

“I did forget.” Her father laughed. “Anyhow, we didn’t miss anything. Simon was bar-mitzvahed in the Reform temple. The church.”

“The church!” repeated Anita. “Dad, what’s the story?”

“The story, Anita?” Her father took a deep breath. Then he said:

“Once upon a time, a jeweler was taking the subway home to East Flatbush from his shop on Forty-sixth Street. At Nostrand, he finally got a seat and opened his
Post
when he heard loud voices at the far end of the car. Looking up, he saw three Puerto Rican kids in sneakers, jeans, and hot pink silk jackets which said ‘Men Working’ on the fronts, backs, and sleeves. When he realized that the jackets had been stitched together from the flags Con Ed put up near excavations, he found this so interesting that it took him a while to notice that the kids had knives and were working their way through the car, taking money and jewelry from the passengers and dropping them into a bowling bag. Then he thought: Only in New York do thieves wear clothes which glow in the dark. The boys didn’t seem to be hurting anyone, but it still didn’t make the jeweler comfortable. He thought: Is this how it happens? One night you pick the wrong subway car, and bingo! you’re an item in the morning paper.

“Halfway down the car, they reached an old lady who started to scream. Then suddenly, the lights began to flash on and off in a definite pattern: three long blinks, three short blinks, three long blinks. By the fourth SOS the muggers had their noses pressed against the door, and when it opened at the station, they ran. ‘Thank God, it’s a miracle!’ cried the old lady.

“Meanwhile the jeweler had his head between his knees. He was trying to breathe, thinking he must have been more scared than he’d known. Then he looked up and saw a young Hasidic man watching him from across the aisle.

“‘It wasn’t a miracle,’ said the Hasid. ‘I did it. Follow me out at the next stop.’

“Normally, this jeweler wasn’t the type to follow a Hasid out onto the Eastern Parkway station. But all he could think of was, had his wallet been stolen, he’d have had to spend all the next day at the Motor Vehicles Bureau replacing his license and registration. He felt that he owed somebody something, and if this Hasid was taking credit, keeping him company was the least he could do.

“On the platform, the Hasid pointed to a bare light bulb and said, ‘Look.’ The light blinked on and off. Then he waved at a buzzing fluorescent light. It blinked too. ‘I lied before,’ said the Hasid. ‘It wasn’t my doing. Everything is the rebbe’s…’”

Anita’s father stopped when her mother came in, drying her hands. “Bertie!” Anita’s mother cried, picking the baby up and waltzing him into the kitchen. “Don’t listen to this nonsense! A whole life ruined for one blinky light bulb!”

“It wasn’t the light,” said Anita’s father.

Anita wanted to ask if his story really happened or if he’d made it up as a metaphor for what happened. She thought: Something must have happened. In the old days, her father didn’t make up stories. But she forgot her questions when she heard her mother in the kitchen singing “Music, Music, Music” to Bertie, singing “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon,” sounding just like Teresa Brewer.

Now, five months later, watching the parents of cult members on
Donahue
, Anita decides that her father’s story left out all the important parts. Such as: why he really joined. There’s no overlooking the obvious reasons: old age, sickness, death. If they’d been Protestant and he’d converted to Catholicism, no one would have wondered why.

She remembers a weekend this past summer when Jamie was away on business—with Lizzie, she thinks now—and her parents came up to see her. Her father drove her to the supermarket to shop for their visit and for Jamie’s return. At the checkout stand, the kid who packed their order insisted, over her father’s protests, on wheeling the cart out and loading the bags into their—the old man’s, the pregnant woman’s—car. Like her father, Anita was angry at the kid. Couldn’t he see that her father could have done it? Not for nothing did he swim fifteen laps at the JCC pool every Sunday morning. But the crazy thing was, for the whole way home, Anita was mad at her father.

Her father is still in shape. And despite all the rushing to
shul
every morning and from there to work, he seems pretty relaxed. What’s hurting her family, Anita decides, is the unpredictability, the shaky sense that everyone is finally unreliable. What’s bothering her mother is that the man she’s shared her bed with for thirty-three years has suddenly and without warning rolled to the opposite side. She must wonder if the sheet with the hole in it has been there all along.

Anita wants to tell her mother that there’s no guarantee; you can’t know anything about anyone. She wants to ask: What’s so strange about a man wanting to sing and dance his way into heaven? But if they’ve never even talked about sex, how can they talk about this?