In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  8

  MANNY CAME OVER ONE evening after supper to sell Howard some life insurance. He was a musician too, a drummer with a group Howard had known for years, but on certain nights Manny turned into an insurance salesman.

  Howard had grown up with an awareness of mortality, with conversations about it at breakfast. After all, his father was a funeral director. The whole family knew that those platitudes of consolation he recited were only a commercial front for the worst possible knowledge. Those were dead people being prepared and then buried, and it was for ever and ever.

  Still, it hadn’t struck Howard until he was ten or so, ambling along in his schoolboy innocence, tossing a ball in the air, thinking of baseball cards, of the candy in his pocket, of nothing. Boom! He had been assaulted with the truth! That was him in those polished boxes, draped with flags and flowers. That was him shut in the darkness of the earth. No matter how deep you dug there would be no smiling Chinaman waiting with colored lanterns and bowls of rice. There would not be a living soul. Howard was stunned by the revelation. He staggered like a drunkard around the street. He didn’t want to believe it, but it was certainly true. Everyone dies, even handsome boys who are loved. His own father’s gloominess was simply a hot tip from a man with inside information.

  It was a delayed reaction. His father had taken him to the funeral home the week before, despite his mother’s protests that he wasn’t old enough yet to know what was what. But his father had an eye on the future. Howard was an only son and it couldn’t be denied, undertaking was steady work. An uncle had a repertoire of nervous jokes. See the cemetery, kid? Everyone’s dying to get in.

  What did Howard want to be when he grew up? He wanted to be Tom Mix or Joe DiMaggio. He wanted to live in an apartment house where dogs were permitted. He wanted the leisure to reread every comic book he had ever owned.

  There was a funeral service in progress when Howard and his father got there. “Lift your feet,” his father said. “Fix your tie.”

  Outside a train of long, black cars waited, their motors humming in hymn-like harmony. Inside it was dark and dreary, like assembly on a rainy day at school, like the movie theater just before the lights go on again after the main attraction.

  The main attraction here was the coffin. Of course Howard had seen coffins before, had even been to the display room where the bereaved made their final selection. But then there were no bodies, no ghosts, and seeing a variety of coffins like that made it difficult to associate them with the tragedy of a single death. Howard wasn’t interested in death anyway. No one had died in his family during his time, except for distant relatives, who were now only more distant. Tennessee, Chicago, or hell, it didn’t make much difference to a dreaming boy. Seeing a stage set without the actors, without the play itself, has no real impact. You can tell it’s only theater, only make-believe.

  But now there was everything! The leading actors, those mourners, swaying and murmuring in the front rows; the chorus of interested parties in the other rows, men in dark suits, everyone in hats, women wearing gloves. And the coffin! A single chosen box in which, his father told him, the shrouded body of an old woman reposed. Would his father fool him? It was possible. Over the years he had threatened bogeymen for bad behavior, explained thunder as God’s rolling of pickle barrels, and Howard’s penis as something to be left strictly alone.

  What Howard would have given for a quick peek inside! He imagined the coffin opened, and the woman popping up like a jack-in-the-box. Boy, those people would all be surprised. How did they know she was dead anyway? Could you die if you didn’t want to, if you breathed in-out, in-out without a stop?

  Children died too. He knew that because his parents sometimes whispered together when his father came home, his mother rolling her eyes and wringing her hands and then knocking on wood for good luck. Howard would go to the window and look upward for the Angel of Death. But he was nowhere to be seen. He was still in that other neighborhood, where some other poor boy had drowned or succumbed to a childhood disease.

  But most of the corpses were old. It was impossible to imagine their great age, what it was like to live inside the shirred skin, to take little slow steps like a windup toy running out. They were them and Howard was himself, sleek as summer fruit, bouncy as a new Spalding. If he breathed on a mirror, there was evidence. If he peed into snow it would melt.

  The rabbi spoke about the deceased. He said she was a wife and a mother and a grandmother, bringing a ruffle of response from the first row. He said she had been a simple woman, had come to this country as a young immigrant girl without a family, without a dime. More murmurs, a few sobs. She had married young and raised a family. She had worked side by side with her dear husband, may he rest in peace, in his bakery where rolls were sold two for a penny, imagine! She had nothing to regret, not those children: doctor, accountant, high school teacher, whose heads bobbed now in acknowledgment of their names like flowers in a breeze. Not those devoted grandchildren who squirmed in their seats, looking to the back of the room and past Howard, to the doors marked EXIT.

  His father wore his solemn face and a neat three-pointed handkerchief in his breast pocket. The mourners rose and sat, listened and wept until it was all over. Then a side door was opened, letting in a dizzying blaze of sunlight, the real life of traffic and birds.

  A week later Howard knew everything in a terrifying onslaught of knowledge. There was an old woman in that box, but there was a young girl in there too, and maybe even a baby, cradled in Russia, waiting to grow up and come to America and sell rolls two for a penny. Oh!

  Well, at least you could buy insurance. At least you could provide for the loved ones left behind. At first the two men had talked shop. It was so nice, sitting in lamplight with Howard and his friend, hearing words like “riff and “ride,” “set” and “arrangement.” I almost forgot why Manny had come. But then he cleared his throat and took his briefcase from behind the chair.

  Now we were into a new language. Manny put on a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses that looked like a disguise from a kid’s spy set. “Actuary charts,” he said. “Premium rates.” “Term.” “Straight life.” He opened brochures across the table and he and Howard bent over them, navigators charting a perilous course.

  “I’m taking twenty in straight life,” Howard announced, after I brought some coffee in.

  “How about a policy on me?” I said, but Howard wouldn’t think of it. His death was the issue here. Term dwindles, he explained, if you live long enough. Lots of the policies had titles that were only euphemisms for term insurance. “I have responsibilities now,” Howard said. “The ten thousand from the V.A. is only peanuts.” He wanted Jason to go to college, to medical school too, if that was what he wanted. I imagined Jason in a cap and gown, a Brownie Bar still nailing his feet together.

  “That’s that,” Howard said, after Manny left. “Just a physical exam and everything will be arranged. You’re taken care of.”

  “Stop talking about it,” I said.

  “Don’t act like a kid. You have to face facts.” He paced, a cigarette suspended from his lip, his eyes squinted against the smoke. He went to the refrigerator, looked inside and then, shut it again.

  “All right,” I said, “but stop talking about it.”

  We went to bed, but neither of us could fall asleep. We turned from side to side in a restless ballet. “Stop thinking about it,” I hissed.

  In the middle of the night, I found Howard sprawled near the foot of the bed, naked, uncovered. His body hair was damp and curling. His feet and genitals looked as pale as a saint’s. I drew the covers around him and put my mouth against his ear. “I won’t let you,” I whispered.

  9

  SHERRY WAS RIGHT ABOUT one thing at least. The writing wasn’t going well at all. There had been only a few poems since Howard and I were married, and it wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried. Sometimes there were just beginnings: one or two aborted lines. After lovemaking, I would feel myself ready for a poem
, as if I had been transfused with inspiration. But then nothing followed except for a dreaming stupor that finally became sleep. I supposed I was too tired, that I had to adjust to the hectic pace of married life and motherhood.

  I kept books of poetry on my night table for encouragement and comfort. I could open Oscar Williams’ Little Treasury of Modern Poetry to almost any page and be soothed by Auden or Frost, Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. I thought of that dry spell as a refueling period, a time to gather new experience for distillation. It doesn’t matter, I consoled myself. Soon the poems would come unbidden, if I only had patience. But it’s well known that you should write something every day to keep your hand in. It’s known that there are poems everywhere, that they perish in the streets for want of a poet. I looked in the growing clutter of Jason’s toys. I watched water escape from my cupped hand held over the washbasin. I sifted carefully through the dust mice under the beds, but there were no poems anywhere.

  It was impossible to write in the morning. I sat on the edge of the bed, bladder bloated and teeth furred, waiting for my turn in the bathroom. Then I went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast, to squeeze orange juice and to shake weightless crystals into bowls. When I cracked the crown of Howard’s egg, I discovered it wasn’t cooked enough, that the white was a translucent amoeba and had to be disguised with bread. Howard, in love, didn’t notice, or didn’t say.

  When he was gone to his studio for the day, I took out my writer’s box. It was once the container for Jason’s baby blanket and there was still some blue fuzz lining the sides. I carried the box back to bed and examined those beginning lines as if I had expected them to continue themselves when I wasn’t looking. Then I changed the clerical order of the old rejection slips from chronological to alphabetical. Now The Antioch Review was on top, and for some reason this made me feel better.

  I dressed Jason and myself warmly because it was early winter and we went down in the elevator. I had an appointment with my dentist Dr. Sussman, and I had to do my weekly marketing. A woman in the building who did babysitting would meet us in the playground. As soon as I stepped outside, it began to snow. I put Jason in the sandbox next to other small children and I sat on one of the benches nearby. It was time for him to begin a social life of his own. I watched the children sitting in the sandbox with snow falling on their heads. “I shouldn’t really be here,” I confided to the woman sitting next to me. “I should be upstairs writing my head off.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I should be upstairs cutting out a dress pattern. It’s all over the kitchen table. It’s all pinned and everything.”

  I smiled fiercely at her. “A writer isn’t worth a damn without self-discipline. I bet Norman Mailer is somewhere right now banging away. On his typewriter.”

  She was a little brown winter bird of a woman. She wore navy-blue shoes. For a while she didn’t say anything at all, and then she put her arm through mine, establishing a bond between us. She leaned her little bird face closer and she said, “Could you use a good story?” Before I could explain that I wasn’t that kind of writer, she trapped my arm with the pressure of hers and began: “I was raised in a foster home,” she said. “My Mom and Dad were very fine people. They treated me as if I was their natural child. Mom always said, ‘God gave you to us and you are our very own.’ And that’s how I was treated. And yet I began to wonder about my natural mother, who she was, who I was. I don’t like to say my ‘real’ mother because the person who raises you should have that honor. Well, this business of my natural mother began to drive me crazy. Mom and Dad didn’t like for me to ask them, but many times I thought when I grow up I will look for her and find out the whole story of why she gave me up.”

  Oh God, I thought. My baby-sitter had come and taken Jason, waving to me as she left the playground. The snow was heavier now and the other mothers took their children from the sandbox.

  But the woman in the brown coat continued. She told me that she was married at nineteen to a good man and that they had three children together. “To make a long story short,” she said, patting my impatient arm, “one night my husband and I went to see a show. At the intermission we were standing around getting a breath of air when I turned around and saw this woman. Something about her made my hair stand up and my spine tingle. Do you know that feeling? I grabbed my husband’s arms and I said, ‘Joe, look at that woman over there in the blue dress.’ When I pointed her out he said, ‘Yeah, what about her?’ and I said, ‘Joe, take a good look.’ It was scary because she had my exact nose and this thing here over my lip and Joe said, ‘Jesus.’ I said, ‘Joe, what should I do?’ Just then the woman looked over our way, but she didn’t notice us or anything, you know? The lights started to go off and on to tell you to go back to your seats, and I got real nervous. I said, ‘Joe, what should I do?’ The crowd began to move back into the theater and we both just stood there and the woman got lost in the crowd.”

  All the children and mothers were gone from the playground and the woman and I sat on the bench, our laps filling with snow.

  “Did you find her?” I asked wearily. “Was it your real mother?”

  “My natural mother,” she corrected. “That’s the thing. I couldn’t find her again. We looked all over the theater and then Joe said it was crazy because I was born in the Midwest and things like that don’t happen in real life.”

  I sighed and she looked at me anxiously. “Listen,” she said, “if you don’t like the ending, you can change it. I know that all the world likes a happy ending.”

  “It’s not that,” I said.

  “I felt, that as a writer, you would appreciate it.”

  “It’s not that,” I said again.

  Her mouth formed a narrow bitter line! “Nobody is interested in what happens to the little people in this world.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  We sat there in silence for a moment and then she said, “Perhaps you would prefer an anecdote. Everybody loves a good laugh. The most marvelous zany things keep happening to me. Lucille Ball makes a mint out of stuff like this. Listen, I once baked my wedding ring into a meat loaf. Wait, that’s not all. My sister-in-law swallowed it!” She began to laugh. “It was a riot when it happened. Right out of the Lucy show. Ha ha. I once set fire to my apron carrying in a birthday cake.” She laughed louder. “I have a wonderful funny life!” she shouted.

  I stood up in my wet shoes and I walked out of the playground to the bus stop.

  Dr. Sussman’s office is in a new medical building. He looks out of place in these surroundings of chrome and glass, because he is a melancholy man and his mustache is wild and drooping. “You’re soaking wet,” he said sadly, and then, “Open wide.” He found a big cavity on the upper right. “Almost nothing left here. We’ll try to save it,” he said. After an injection of novocaine, I watched him assemble his tools on the little round tray.

  The white paper bib on my chest reduced me to an old helplessness. I waited for the novocaine to take effect. “I’m suffering from writer’s block,” I said.

  “Whazzat?” He opened my mouth and peered inside.

  “No no. Writer’s block. I’m a writer.”

  He was very interested. He listened to the story of my block and all the rejection slips. He clucked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Then the weight of numbness began to set in and he started to work on the cavity. Tools passed in silver lines. “Can you feel this? No?” Water ran inside my head. While he drilled, Dr. Sussman confessed that he was a poet too. He had been writing poetry for twenty years, but he never sent it anywhere. We stared into one another’s eyes and then he shut his. “Pigeons,” he began in a husky voice.

  He began to recite from memory his poem about pigeons. It was a very long poem and it had words like lancinate and panoplied and isotropy. The recitation seemed to leave him more melancholy than ever. A bead of moisture hung in his mustache. “What do you think?” he asked.

  I tried to speak and gagged on some cotton wadding. He removed it and I
said, “Oh, the language. Yes.”

  He smiled. “Lay off the sweets,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder.

  When I left his office, pigeons still passed before me in a dreary gray file. My mouth was lifted in a snarl. Outside the snow had stopped. I rode the bus to the supermarket near our complex. There were no poems in the street. There was nothing anywhere. Steam piped up under my feet. I thought: lamb chops, yams, shelving paper.

  The checkout girl in the supermarket was one of those pale, pretty teenagers. I pulled the groceries from my cart and put them on the moving counter. They began to roll past me. Lamb chops. Jell-O.

  “I spend half my life in the supermarket,” I told the girl.

  She smiled, ringing it up.

  “I just try to get out of writing, I guess.”

  Her hand paused on the shelving paper. “You a writer?” she asked.

  “Yes.” My mouth stiffened in defense and my jaw ached where the needle had entered. Beneath a fringe of hair her eyes were thoughtful. Was this still another poet? Were her perceptions and dreams scribbled on reams of register tape? But then her eyes cleared and her foot tapped the pedal that set the counter rolling again.

  “That’s nice,” she said at last. She put my groceries in two paper bags and they seemed an incredible weight in my arms. It was difficult to breathe. “Well, good-bye,” I gasped.

  “So long. Keep plugging, you hear?” She waved me through the electric eye door.

  The elevator took me back to the nineteenth floor of Building A. After I put my groceries away, I made black raspberry Jell-O and at the last minute I sliced two bananas into the mixture. They drifted like stones to the bottom of the bowl.