Women and Children First (14 page)

Anita bundles Bertie up in so many layers that he does look like a spaceman, and takes him to the library. On the subway, she notices that the lights flash on and off. The train is almost empty and she thinks about muggers in hot pink Con Ed jackets, but feels that Bertie is a kind of protection. Babies are unpredictable, like crazy people; she’s heard you can sometimes scare muggers away by pretending to be crazy.

The librarians in the Judaica section eye Bertie so suspiciously that he exhausts himself trying to charm them and falls asleep in Anita’s arms. Juggling baby and purse, she pulls out some reference books on Hasidism and sits down.

She’s surprised at how much she already knows, what she has picked up from growing up in New York, from college, reading, and sheer osmosis. She starts Martin Buber’s
Tales of the Hasidim
, then decides she must have read it or else heard the stories somewhere. She thinks of Jamie’s friend Ira who’d visited once a year from his Orthodox commune in Cambridge, bringing his own food in an Empire Kosher Poultry shopping bag. She can’t remember him telling stories.

For information about her father’s sect, she’s directed to the microfilm section. The librarian hands her a flat box, then seeing that it’s impossible for her to thread the machine while holding Bertie, gives her a sour smile and does it for her.

For some reason, they’ve microfilmed whole editions of the city papers. Anita likes flipping back through the pages; it’s like reading a story when you already know the end, only eerier. Meanwhile she learns that fifteen years ago, her father’s group came from Hungary via Israel to their present home in Brooklyn. In the centerfold of the
Daily News
, there’s a photo of the rebbe walking from Kennedy airport to Brooklyn because his plane from Jerusalem had landed on the Sabbath, when he wasn’t allowed to ride. Taken at night, the picture is blurred, hard to read. The rebbe is all white hair and white beard, Mr. Natural in a beaver hat. On the next page is an ad for leather boots from Best and Co.—thirty dollars, fifteen years ago, an outrageously low price.

Ironically, the reason Anita can’t concentrate is that she’s being distracted by the noise from the Mitzvahmobile parked on Forty-second Street, blaring military-sounding music from its loudspeakers. She pictures the Hasidim darting from one pedestrian to another, asking, “Excuse me, are you Jewish?”

One afternoon, not long after she and Jamie first fell in love, they were approached by the Mitzvahmobilers, and Jamie said yes, he was Jewish. They dragged him—literally dragged him—into the trailer. The weather was nice, and nothing in those days seemed like an imposition, so Anita had waited on the library steps till Jamie emerged, looking pale.

Apparently, the Hasidim had tried to teach him how to lay
tefillin
, but he just couldn’t get the hang of it. He froze, his hands wouldn’t work. Finally they gave up. They put the phylacteries in his hands, then covered his hands with theirs and just held them, one on his forehead, and one on his arm near his heart.

On Friday nights, Anita’s father sleeps at the
bet hamidrash
so he won’t have to travel on the Sabbath, and her sister Lynne comes for dinner.

As children, Anita and Lynne fought, as their mother, says, tooth and nail. Now it’s simpler: they love one another—so Anita feels disloyal for thinking that Lynne is just like Valerie Harper playing Rhoda. But it’s true, and it’s not just the curly hair, the tinted glasses, the running shoes, and the tight designer jeans. It’s Lynne’s master’s thesis, “The Changing Role of Women as Reflected in Women’s Magazines, 1930–1960.” It’s her job as a social worker in a family-planning clinic and her boyfriend Arnie, who’s almost got his degree as a therapist and is already practicing on the Upper West Side.

Lynne and Anita kiss hello. Then Lynne puts her arms around their mother, who’s stirring something at the stove, and hugs her for so long that Anita starts feeling uncomfortable. Finally she zeroes in on Bertie, ensconced in his yellow plastic recliner chair on the kitchen table.

“Look how he holds his head up!” says Lynne.

Bertie’s been holding his head up since he was two weeks old, and Lynne’s seen it, but Anita refrains from pointing this out. Together they set the table, then Lynne pulls her into a corner and asks what she hears from Jamie.

“Oh, he’s coming to see Bertie tomorrow.”

Lynne stares at Anita, trying to ascertain if this “means” anything. Then she gets her purse and starts rummaging around. She takes out a tortoiseshell case, brushes tobacco dust off it, and gives it to Anita, who knows what it is before she opens it: eye shadow, a palette of different colors.

“Thanks,” says Anita. The gift moves her and reminds her of what she’s always known: her sister is less of a feminist or a Rhoda than a real magazine reader, a girl who believes in her heart that eye shadow can change your luck.

For Lynne, their mother has cooked the same company dinner she made when Anita first came home. But without their father’s blessing, the meat tastes greasy, the potatoes lukewarm; the gelatin has a rubbery skin. His absence should free them, thinks Anita, but he’s all they talk about, in voices so low he might as well be downstairs.

With Lynne’s coaching, their mother talks, and Anita sees she’s been wrong: her mother’s unhappiness isn’t philosophical, it’s practical. Imagine being forced to start keeping a kosher home at the age of fifty-three! Two sets of dishes! The doctor says salting the meat is bad for her heart. The smallest details of life now have rules which Sam won’t let her break; she has to take the train to Essex Street to buy special soap for him.

If it gets much worse, Lynne suggests, she might consider a trial separation.

“Who would it help?” their mother asks. “Would it make me happier? Would it make Daddy happier?”

“I doubt it,” says Anita.

“What would make me happy,” their mother says, “is for Daddy to turn back into his normal self.”

Anita wonders what would make her happy. Lately she’s not sure. Bertie makes
her
happy, but it seems important to remember he’ll grow up and leave her. If you can count on anything, she thinks, it’s that.

She senses that Lynne is talking less about happiness than about punishment. Lynne feels that their father is responsible for their mother’s troubles, just as Jamie is for hers. Anita thinks that no one’s to blame for her parents’ situation; and in her own case, she’s partly at fault.

Her first mistake was to gain so much weight when she was pregnant. Why should Jamie have faith she’d lose it when her own doctor didn’t? Now she has, but, clearly, it’s too late.

Her second mistake was to quit her job, even if it was the lowest editorial job in the world, the slush pile at
Reader’s Digest
. Most of the submissions were for “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met,” and most of these had never done one unforgettable thing except die slowly of some horrible cancer. Jamie liked hearing about them; he said they made him feel better about
his
day. And after she quit and took to reading long novels—anything, so long as it went on for more than four hundred pages—it wasn’t the same. She’d try to tell Jamie about the Baron Charlus or Garp’s mother, and he’d be staring past her. Once, to test him, she said, “My doctor said it’s going to be triplets,” and he just kept gazing beyond her out the dark kitchen window at the lights moving slowly up the Hudson.

Which reminds her of her third mistake: they never argued. Lynne, who fights with Arnie over every little thing, has told her that she and Jamie were afraid of their anger. Maybe so. Even when Jamie told her he was leaving, Bertie was there, listening to what for him was their first conversation. How could they have fought?

Anita wonders what happened to that part of her that used to fight tooth and nail with Lynne. She imagines Jamie and Lizzie litigating over every avocado in the supermarket. It’s the only way she can stand thinking of him in the supermarket with somebody else.

Once, visiting friends in Berkeley, Anita and Jamie went to an all-night supermarket for orange juice. They took a joint for the ride and got so stoned that, when they got there, they couldn’t move. They just stood near the vegetable bins, talking, laughing, marveling over the vegetables, those California vegetables!

Once more, Anita feels like she’s watching the Zapruder film. She’s the only assassination buff who can’t even handle a magnifying glass, who wouldn’t know a smoking gun if she saw one.

Anita’s wasted the morning trying to imagine her conversation with Jamie. She’s afraid she’ll have nothing interesting to say. She blames this on living in her parents’ house, where nothing interesting ever happens. She feels that living there marks her as a boring person with no interesting friends she could have stayed with. But that’s not true. She and Bertie would have been welcome in the editing room of Irene’s SoHo loft, on the couch in Jeanie’s Park Slope floor-through. But being home is easier, she doesn’t have to be a good guest. If Bertie cries at night, her mother comes in and offers to sing him Teresa Brewer.

One thing she could tell Jamie is what she’s noticed at the Pathmark: more and more people seem to be buying huge quantities of specialty items, whole shopping carts full of apricot yogurt, frozen tacos, Sprite in liter plastic jugs. She’s heard that American families hardly ever sit down to dinner together. So who knows, maybe there are millions of people out there, each eating only one thing. She could tell him how she took Bertie to the park to see some other babies. He slept the whole time, leaving her with the other mothers, none of whom even smiled at her. At one point, a little boy threw sand at a little girl. The girl’s mother ran over, grabbed the boy’s ankles, and turned him upside down. Anita expected coins to rain out of his pockets like in the movies, but none did. After a while, the boy’s mother came over, and, instead of yelling at the woman who was shaking her upsidedown son, said, “I’m glad it’s you and not me.” Anita felt as if she’d stumbled in on a game already in progress, like polo or a new kind of poker with complicated rules which no one would stop to explain.

But the last thing she wants is to sound like some pitiful housewife driving back and forth between the supermarket and the playground. She wonders what sort of lawyer Lizzie is. Corporate taxes, she hopes, but fears it’s probably the most interesting cases: mad bombings, ax murders, billion-dollar swindles.

She’s tempted to tell Jamie about her father, how for a week or so last month he’d been instructed by his rebbe: instead of saying grace, he should clap his hands whenever the spirit of thanksgiving moved him. In the hour and a half it took to eat—with her father dropping his silverware, clapping, shutting his eyes as if smelling something sweet—Anita tried to predict these outbursts, but couldn’t; she thought of the retarded people one heard sometimes in movie theaters, shouting out randomly, for no reason. She could tell Jamie how her father came home in a green velvet Tyrolean hat with a feather; apparently, the rebbe had given out dozens of hats to illustrate his sermon: the righteous man must climb this world like a mountain.

But she knows that telling Jamie would only make her angry at him for not being around tomorrow when she’ll need to tell him the next installment. Nor does it make her happy right now to think that Jamie knows her father well enough to know that in the old days, he wouldn’t have been caught dead in a Tyrolean hat.

The obvious subject is Bertie. Everything he does interests her; she thinks he’s a genius. Why can’t she tell Jamie about his practiced smiles, about his picking up his own Cheerios? Why? Because what could be more pitiful than thinking that anyone cares if your five-month-old can pick up his own Cheerios?

Bertie’s victory over Cheerios should be their victory. Instead, she can hardly talk about Bertie; it’s as if she’s accusing Jamie. Bertie should be the mortar cementing them; as it is, he’s part of the wall.

When Jamie rings the doorbell, Anita half hopes that Bertie, who hasn’t seen his father for two weeks, will not recognize him and scream. Bertie looks at Jamie, then at Anita, then at Jamie, then smiles a smile which anyone could tell is his real one.

Anita’s mother says, “Jamie! There’s apple cake in the fridge if you kids get hungry.” Then she backs out of the room. It’s so uncomfortable they could be high-schoolers dating—except for the presence of Bertie and the fact that Anita and Jamie didn’t know each other in high school.

“Can we go for a walk somewhere?” Jamie is staring to the side of Anita’s head, at Bertie. Anita feels as if he’s asking Bertie out and is one of those guys who’s scared to be alone with his date. She’s the friend he drags along, the chaperone.

“Sure,” says Anita. Bertie’s wriggling so hard his feet jam halfway down the legs of his snowsuit and Anita has to thread them through. She knows she’s making herself look incompetent, making the process of dressing Bertie look harder than it is.

On the way to the park she can’t think of anything to say. She doesn’t want to discuss specialty items at the Pathmark or the upside-down boy. Of course she’s done this before, rehearsed whole conversations that turned out to be inappropriate. But never with Jamie.

The playground is chilly, almost deserted. In one corner, two five-year-old boys are playing soccer while their parents—all four of them in ponytails—hunker on the ground, passing a joint. There’s a dressed-up Orthodox family sitting in a row on a bench. By the swings, a young mother says to her daughter, “Okay, ten more pushes and we’re going home.” And finally there are some boys—ten, eleven, twelve—playing very hard and punishingly on the jungle gym and slide, as if it’s the playground equipment’s fault that they’ve grown too big for it.

“When is Bertie going to be old enough for the slide?” asks Jamie.

“Tomorrow,” says Anita.

The mother by the swings counts to ten, and when the little girl says “Ten more!” grabs her daughter’s hand and pulls her out of the park. Jamie sits down on one of the swings and stretches his arms out for Bertie. Holding the baby on his lap, Jamie pushes off. Anita can’t look till she reassures herself: she trusts Jamie that much—not to drop Bertie. She sits on the other swing and watches Bertie, who is leaning forward to see where they’re going before they get there.