Women and Children First (15 page)

“Look how he holds his head up,” says Jamie. “That’s my boy.”

“He’s been doing that for four months,” says Anita.

Jamie trails his long legs in the sand and stops with a bump. “Anita,” he says, “just what am I supposed to do? What do you want?”

Anita wonders what she does want. She’s not sure she wants to be back with Jamie. Bertie or no Bertie, it’s too late. Something’s happened that can’t be fixed. Basically, she wants what her mother wants: for everything to be the way it was before everything changed.

“I want to know one thing,” she says. “Remember that garden party at Mel’s?”

“What about it?” says Jamie.

Anita remembers a buffet of elegant, salty things—sun-dried tomatoes, smoked salmon—which by then she wasn’t allowed to eat. “I want to know if you and Lizzie were already…” She thinks: If a woman could walk clear across a party to feel her lover’s wife’s belly, her lover’s unborn child inside it, well then, you really can’t know anything about people.

Jamie says, “Of course not,” but in a tone that makes Anita suspect it began at that party, or thereabouts. She wonders: Did their fingers brush accidentally over a Lebanese olive? A long look near the pesto and sour-cream dip?

“It wasn’t Lizzie.” Jamie’s swinging again, distractedly. “It wasn’t you.”

“Who was it?” she says. “Don’t blame Bertie, he wasn’t born yet.”

“It wasn’t the baby. It was me. Listen—” Jamie stops himself by grabbing the chain on her swing together with his. The seats tilt together crazily. “When I was in the seventh grade, there was a kid in my class named Mitchell Pearlman. One day we got to talking about our dads, and Mitchell said that his was a photographer. He’d been everywhere, done everything. Had he fought with the Mau Maus? Sure. Sipped tea with Queen Elizabeth? Of course. Lived with the Eskimos, crossed the Sahara on a camel? You bet.

“Naturally we thought he was lying till we went to his house for his birthday. The minute we met Mitchell Pearlman’s father—mustache, jeans, big silver belt buckle—we began to think Mitchell was telling the truth. After the cake and ice cream, his father brought out the pictures of himself in front of the igloo, the camel, arm in arm with Jomo Kenyatta, dandling the baby Prince Charles on his knee. And for months after that, for years, I hated my own father. I wouldn’t speak to him.”

“So?” says Anita. “I don’t get it.”

“So, when Bertie was born, I suddenly thought: In a couple of years, he’ll be me in the seventh grade. And I’ll be my father. And he’ll go out and find his own Mitchell Pearlman’s father. And he’ll hate me. I thought: We’ve made a terrible mistake! We should have waited to have Bertie till I was Mitchell Pearlman’s father! Does this make any sense?” There are tears in Jamie’s eyes.

Anita thinks: Not much. For one thing, the chronology’s wrong. Jamie fell in love
before
Bertie was born. For another, Bertie isn’t Jamie and Jamie isn’t his father. Jamie’s father owns a dry cleaners, while Jamie is a labor lawyer with interesting cases. She wants to shout at him that exchanging long looks with a lady lawyer over the pesto is nothing—nothing at all—like fighting with the Mau Maus. But she doesn’t. She’s beginning to see that her sister’s right: this is something some men do. Jamie himself doesn’t understand, any more than Mitchell Pearlman’s father understood why he found it so easy to leave the wife and kids and take off across the Sahara.

She imagines Jamie ten years hence, taking Bertie out for the afternoon. He’s one of those weekend fathers she never really noticed till she was pregnant, and then she saw them everywhere. She could always tell how uneasy it made them to take their kids places whole families went. Recently she read in the
Times
: there’s a health club in Manhattan which, on Saturdays and Sundays, caters exclusively to single fathers and their children. Ten years from now, there will be hundreds of these places.

She imagines men and children lolling in a steamy pool, pumping exercycles, straining on Nautilus machines. There are no women in her vision, it’s as if all the mothers have died of some plague. She hears the cries of the children, sees the shoulders of the fathers rounded as if from the weight of the children tugging their arms.

The only thing she can’t picture is how Bertie will look in ten years’ time.

For weeks, her father has been asking her to come to a service in his
shul.
“The worst that’ll happen is that you’ll have fun,” he says. It’s made Anita a little nervous, like having a Moonie ask her to go away for the weekend. But the day after Jamie’s visit, she agrees. There’s nothing but football on TV.

“Can me and Bertie sit in the same section?” she asks.

“Don’t be smart,” says her father.

When she comes downstairs in a turtleneck and good brown corduroy jeans, she sees him really suffering with embarrassment. She goes and changes into a long skirt from the back of her closet, an Indian print from the sixties.

On the drive down Eastern Parkway, Anita and her father don’t talk. Again she has the peculiar feeling of being on a date. There’s not much traffic on this Sunday, and everything seems so slowed down that she’s slow to notice: her father’s whole driving style has changed. He used to zip around like a cabbie, teeth grinding, swerving, cursing. Now he keeps to his lane, he’s got all the time in the world. His elbow is out the side window, and cold air is rushing into the car.

“Can you shut that?” says Anita. “The baby.”

“Sure,” says her father. “Sorry.”

“What kind of service are we going to?”

“A wedding.”

“Turn the car around,” says Anita.

“Don’t be stupid,” says her father. “Would you have preferred a funeral? All right—next time, a funeral.”

“What next time?” says Anita.

“You’ll be interested,” says her father. “The ceremony is outside, under the stars.”

“Stars you can see from Crown Heights?” says Anita. “I’ll be interested.”

In the old days, her father used to start looking for parking places miles in advance. She remembers hours of accelerating, then falling forward as the brakes squealed in the search for a spot in Chinatown. Now as they pull up to the block in which hundreds of Hasidim are milling around, her father cruises smoothly into an empty space.

The short winter afternoon is darkening. The street lights come on. The air is crisp and clear. The men wear nearly identical black coats, the women’s are of various subdued hues. Most of the women are in high, good leather boots which remind Anita of the ad on the microfilm. It’s easy to spot the converts like her father in his fur-collared car coat, the young men in denim and down; it annoys her that several young women wear paisley skirts much like hers.

The crowd spills off the sidewalk, blocking the northbound lane, but the two cops parked in their squad car ignore it. Leaning on other cars, Puerto Rican kids in sweatshirts and down vests idly hump their girlfriends as they watch the Hasidim assemble. The wedding canopy is already up, held by four men who keep switching the pole from hand to hand so they can warm the free hand in their pockets.

Suddenly everyone’s buzzing like bees. Anita’s father leans forward and says, “The rebbe.”

Anita stands on tiptoe. But from a quarter block away, the rebbe looks pretty much like the photo: Mr. Natural. That’s another reason she could never join this sect: being female, she’d never get closer to the rebbe than this. She turns to say this to her father, but he’s gone—drawn, she imagines, toward his rebbe.

The crowd buzzes again when the bride and groom appear. The bride’s leaning on some women, the groom on some men. They both look ready to drop. When Anita gets a good look at the groom—gangly, skin the color of skim milk—she understands why the bride can hardly walk. How could anyone marry
that
?

Nearly rigid in his quilted snowsuit, Bertie’s getting heavy. Anita holds him up though she knows he’s too young to focus on the center of attention, too young to know there is a center. To Bertie, everything’s the center: the scarf of the woman in front of him, his own inaccessible fist.

Anita thinks: the bride must be freezing. Maybe that’s why she’s so hunched over as the women lead her in circles around the groom. Under the veil, she could be anything—old, ugly, sick, some covered-up temple idol. No wonder the groom is so panicky!

Even with all the Hebrew prayers, the ceremony is over in no time. They always are, thinks Anita, except when people write their own. Real religions and even the state seem to know: if it drags on too long, somebody
will
faint. Anita and Jamie got married impulsively in a small town on the California-Nevada border. What she mostly remembers is sitting in a diner in Truckee, writing postcards to all their friends saying that she’d just been married in the Donner Pass by a one-armed justice of the peace.

Her thoughts are interrupted by cheers; the groom has broken the glass. Then bride and groom and wedding canopy disappear in the crowd bearing them—and Anita and Bertie—into the hall.

Just inside the door, the men and women peel off in opposite directions. Anita follows the women into a large room with a wooden dance floor surrounded by round tables, set with centerpieces of pink carnations in squat crystal vases and groupings of ginger ale and seltzer bottles.

No one’s saving places or jockeying to be near friends. The ladies just sit. Anita stands for a minute or so, then sees two women beckoning and patting the chair between them, so she goes and sits down. She soon understands why the women have found places so quickly: it doesn’t matter where they sit, no one stays put for more than two seconds. They kiss and gab, then get up, sit next to a friend at another table, kiss and gab some more. Meanwhile the waiters are weaving through with bowls of hot soup, shouting to the women to get out of their way. But no one’s paying attention.

The woman to Anita’s right is middle-aged and kind of pretty. She’s Mrs. Lesser. When the waiter brings Anita’s soup, Mrs. Lesser pushes it away so Anita won’t spill it in her struggle with Bertie’s zipper.

“Your first baby?” asks Mrs. Lesser.

“Yes,” says Anita.

“I had my first when I was sixteen. Can you believe I’m a grandmother?”

Anita might not have thought it, but she can believe it; she doesn’t know quite what to say.

“Can
you
believe it?” Mrs. Lesser puts her big face near Bertie’s little one, and Bertie rewards her with his most radiant, sweetest, and most inauthentic social smile.

“Look at this baby smile!” Mrs. Lesser says to the whole table. “Look at this sweetheart!” It’s Anita’s introduction to the room at large, and all at once it’s open season on Bertie. Mrs. Lesser gets up and someone else sits down and starts stroking Bertie’s cheek.

These women have children and grandchildren of their own, thinks Anita. Why are they so interested? But they are, they’re full of questions. How old is he? What’s his name? Does he sleep through the night? Is he always so good?

Anita feels like Bertie’s ventriloquist. She has to make an effort to speak in her normal voice as she says, “His name’s Bertie. He’s five months old. He can pick up his own Cheerios.”

“Cheerios?” cry the women. “At five months? He’s a genius!”

The partition separating the men’s and women’s sections stops a few feet from the ceiling. Anita’s facing it when suddenly she sees three furry brown things fly up, then plummet, then fly again. Just as she figures out someone’s juggling hats, she hears applause from the other side of the plywood.

With each course, a different woman is making Bertie smile and nibbling from whatever plate the waiter has put down. First comes stuffed derma, then a platter of thick roast beef, little round potatoes, canned peas. Anita picks up a forkful of peas. She isn’t very hungry, it isn’t very good. No one’s eating much; even the fleshiest ladies are just tasting. But every woman who sits down offers to hold Bertie for Anita, or to cut her roast beef. They say to Bertie, “Too bad you can’t eat roast beef, pussycat,” and “Next year at this time you’ll be munching little brown potatoes.”

Slowly at first, the men begin dancing. Anita feels it through the floor before she hears it. Stamp, stamp. Soon the silverware is rattling, the peas are jumping on her plate. The stamping gets faster, there are shouts. Anita wonders if her father is dancing. Probably he is. The door between the two sections is open, children are running back and forth. No one would stop her from looking. But she doesn’t, she just doesn’t.

Singing, clapping, the men make their own music. The women have help. Two men come in with an accordion and a mandolin. The women dance sweetly in couples, a dance that seems part waltz, part foxtrot, part polka. Mrs. Lesser reappears, and when a sprightly gray-haired lady to the far side of her makes swaying motions with her arms, Mrs. Lesser says, “If you’re asking, I’m dancing,” and away they go. A tiny old woman approaches Anita and says, “Would the baby care to dance?”

All the women want to dance with Bertie. Young and old, they keep cutting in, passing him around. Anita catches glimpses of him, first with this one, then with that, sailing, swaying to the music, resting his cheek on their pillowy breasts. When Mrs. Lesser sits back down, she asks where the baby is.

“Dancing,” says Anita.

Mrs. Lesser cranes her neck. “He’s smiling,” she says. “He’s the belle of the ball!”

Suddenly there’s a whoop from the other room, and Anita sees the groom’s head and shoulders over the partition. From the angle of his head, the stricken expression, she knows that this is the part where the men hoist the groom up in a chair and dance. Then the women gather and raise the bride’s chair. The music gets louder, and the women begin circling the bride, dancing with such intensity that Anita goes and finds Bertie and takes him back.

At last the bride’s head is nearly touching the ceiling. Above the partition, she and the groom look at each other. Anita wants to study this look. She thinks it’s something she should pay close attention to. But she’s only half-watching. Mostly she’s concentrating on not dropping Bertie, whom she’s holding up above her head.