“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.
“Look, sweetheart,” she’s saying. “Look at the lady in the chair!”
Bertie sings when he nurses, a sweet satisfied gulping and humming high in his nose. That night, after the wedding, Anita falls asleep while he’s nursing, and his song turns into the song in her dream.
In her dream, Bertie’s singing “Music, Music, Music” just like Teresa Brewer. He’s still baby Bertie, but he’s up on stage, smiling one of his phony smiles, making big stagey gestures like Shirley Temple or those awful children in Annie. One of these gestures is the “okay” sign, thumb and forefinger joined. The circle his fingers make reminds her of the Buddha. It reminds her of a Cheerio.
Anita wakes up laughing, wondering how a little baby could know words like nickelodeon. She gets up, and without detaching Bertie from her breast, slips a bathrobe over both of them and goes downstairs. Except for her parents’ bedroom, where earlier she heard her mother preparing for sleep, every room is lit up. In the kitchen, light is shining from around the edges of the cellar door. Anita and Bertie go down.
Opening the door to the family room, she sees her father sitting cross-legged on the cork-tiled floor. His eyes are shut and tears are shining on his cheeks. But he’s not so out of it that he doesn’t hear her come in. Looking up, he seems frail and embarrassed, an old man caught doing something he’s not supposed to do.
Anita wants to apologize and leave. Then it dawns on her that she’s not down there to bother him. There’s something she wants to ask, but she’s not sure what it is. She wants to ask why all the lights in the house are always on. She wants to ask who he thinks is paying the electric bills.
Anita’s father stands up and dries his eyes with his palm. Then he says, “Hold up your hand.”
Anita holds up her hand and he lifts his, palm facing hers, a few inches away. He asks if she feels anything.
She feels something. A pressure.
She remembers how when she was in labor with Bertie, she held Jamie’s hand. Just before the nurses let her start pushing, she turned to Jamie and said, “I don’t think I can do this.” “Sure you can,” he said, and squeezed her hand so hard she’d thought it was broken. By the time it stopped hurting, the contraction was over and she knew she could go on. Now she sees that Jamie didn’t mean to hurt her. He was scared too.
Her father’s hand is still a few inches away, but its grip feels as tight as Jamie’s. She can almost feel electrons jumping over the space between them, electricity drawing them as close as she is to Bertie, who just at that moment lets go of her breast and sits up, watching them.
Everyday Disorders
WHEN GILDA TRIES TO IMAGINE what Phoebe Morrow looks like, she pictures Amelia Earhart in her rumpled jumpsuit, those fetching goggles and helmet rising straight from the cockpit, long scarf floating straight back, until Gilda realizes that what she’s seeing isn’t Phoebe or Amelia Earhart at all, but, rather, Snoopy as the Red Baron. Lately Gilda’s been troubled by this confusion of images. This winter she reread Madame Bovary, and Emma’s swoony romantic airs kept bringing to mind Miss Piggy. Gilda blames this on how much of the last dozen years she’s spent among children. Childless women have other problems, she knows, but she’s pretty sure that the inability to distinguish the mythic from the cartoon isn’t one of them. When Phoebe Morrow aims her camera at the horizon, she’s not seeing an untrustworthy line which may at any moment turn into a tightrope for Koko the Clown to bounce on; when Phoebe took those famous photographs of the dead Marines in Beirut, she knew she wasn’t shooting G.I. Joe.
Making a square with her fingers, Gilda frames her living room to see what in that mass of discarded clothes and sports equipment and chewed-up baseball cards might catch Phoebe’s eye. Nothing, she realizes, and anyway, Nathan’s already taken that shot. Nathan’
s made his name as a chronicler of everyday disorder, so sometimes it seems unfair that he should chide Gilda for being, alternately, too fussy and not neat enough. The worst argument they ever had was years ago, when Gilda asked Nathan if he’d clean up the downstairs—in fact he had been cleaning, but the children were too much for them both—and he’d said, “After the revolution you’ll be the commissar of cleanliness, the minister who makes sure that everyone keeps their houses neat and tidy.” By now they know there won’t be any revolution, not here in northern Pennsylvania, anyway, and if there is, they won’t be the ones to lead it. Since then they’ve had more serious fights, meaner and closer to the bone. But the reason she still considers that one the worst is that whenever she straightens up—as she is doing now, as she does fairly often, to be sure—she remembers what Nathan said, and it spoils her pleasure in the work and in the look of things when she’s done.
Gilda’s looking for reasons to be angry at Nathan because the real reason seems so meanspirited and small: she’s upset that he’s gotten Phoebe Morrow a one-year job at the college, that he’s picking her up at the airport and they’re headed back here for lunch. At times like this she feels like one of those wives who work to send their husbands through medical or law school and then the husbands take their fancy practices and split. It’s not that Nathan’s about to leave her—things feel solid enough, he’s not looking for someone else—or that she’s ever supported him, but rather that his whole career has been built on his photos of her and their family and their house. What cinched his reputation was that series he took when Gilda’s grandfather came to live with them, that terrible year at the end of her grandfather’s life; it seems incredible now that the first time she really knew Pop was dying was when she read it in a review of Nathan’s show. Nathan’s never understood why it bothered her so when critics wrote of Gilda’s face as balancing on the border between the beautiful and the impossibly ugly. But all that, Gilda understands now, was nothing compared to how she’s felt lately when Nathan, criticizing his own work, says it’s all trivial, meaningless, small, come to nothing; Gilda can’t help thinking he means her. She knows it’s why he pressured his colleagues to hire Phoebe Morrow, who’s been to Beirut, Nicaragua, Iraq, whose specialties are guerrilla encampments, free-fire zones, and risking her neck. Not only does Nathan admire Phoebe’s work; he wishes he’d led her life.
Women and Children First Page 12
