Anna in the Afterlife

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Even now, when Anna remembered Gert’s treachery, this act of revenge (on who? on her? retribution for giving away Bingo?), this betrayal of Janet, of Janet’s trust, she wanted to commit mayhem. The very manner in which Janet found out about the betrayal was a low and underhanded trick. She had gone, one day, with Danny and the children to visit Gert and Harry and discovered the samovar gone from its place. When she inquired about its absence, Gert said, with no apology, “I gave it to my step-grandson. I know his wife will polish it every week. I knew you wouldn’t.”

  The kiss of Judas. That’s what Gert gave Janet.

  Still—loyal and good niece that she was—Janet was standing knee-deep in the debris of Gert’s botched attempt to pass on to greener pastures.

  “Get rid of all the razor blades, all the scissors, any knives you find, throw them right into the trash,” Janet instructed her daughter and nephew. “She isn’t going to have one sharp item in that new place.”

  Carol was opening the china cabinet, beginning to wrap the knickknacks in newspaper. Such valuable things Gert had—all of them from Goldman’s Antiques, things she had finagled Abram into giving her. The silver candlesticks, the amphora, the bisque statue—if those were also going to be inherited one day soon by the step-grandson, Anna was going to whirl like a dervish among them and smash them to pieces right now.

  Handling a person’s private belongings was like committing a forbidden act. Anna could tell her girls were uneasy, sifting through Gert’s underpants, her bras (and her collection of foam rubber falsies), her letters, her checkbook stubs, her photographs. At one point Janet opened Gert’s wedding album (the first husband), and there Anna saw herself and Abram in the full bloom of youth. Over Janet’s shoulder, Anna studied her own face, her good bone structure (her sealed mouth—she never smiled after her teeth were pulled and dentures were installed). Her migraine headaches were supposed to have disappeared after her teeth were pulled, or so the dentist had said, but the headaches were even worse after that. Anna was hardly ever able to eat again without wanting to throw up after every meal.

  But Abram, who was holding the pole of the chuppa, looked magnificent, clear-eyed, wonderful. Six feet tall and strong as a mountain, but sweetness and goodness pouring out of him toward the world. (Too good, maybe; he had been a soft touch, and never knew how to be a good businessman.) Janet was in one of the wedding photos, too—about eleven years old, a skinny marink. Anna’s mother, stolid and simple Sophie, dressed in a dark blue dress, so proud to have her old-maid daughter find a husband.

  To think: the lives that people traveled through in a lifetime. Why was it everyone felt that life was too short when, looking back, it was vast, endless, comprised of dozens of little lives so that, by the end, everyone had lived a thousand times? Anna could pick a moment, any moment—her first day in public school, her first migraine headache, her first taste of chocolate—and write a book about each subject. She could talk about chocolate for a week, about her headaches for a year, what each did to her life, how she first felt about it, how she grew to feel about it, how she felt about it now. Her hands—whether she liked them or not—her fingernails, how she shaped them, her hips, the way she perceived them. And then there were all the people, all the events, all the trips, all the grudges, all the jobs, all the flus and colds—such a wild and magnificent collection of thoughts and experiences. So much misery and worry. And fear—enough of that to choke a person, especially when the children might be in danger.

  This business with Gert’s suicide was a tiny drop in the bucket, a miniscule mosquito bite of an event. Gert’s smallness, pettiness, false sweetness (Abram used to call her “the cat with the velvet claws”), all this hullabaloo about one old lady running the edge of a blade across her veins: where did it figure in the history of the world? It was of no consequence, it didn’t require Anna’s attention anymore. She had other fish to fry and not much time in which to do it.

  In her opinion, Gert, alive or dead, was a closed book. Anna was going to move on to the next subject, whichever appealed to her most, whichever was worth the time she had left. Who knew if, after she was buried, she could take these grand trips across history? For now, she had better be moving along.

  A Good Neighborhood

  ANNA HAD BEEN WORRIED for some time that she was a bigot, maybe even a racist. No one ever spoke those words in Brooklyn in 1945 where it was expected that when a colored woman came to clean someone’s house, she would be given her lunch in a special glass plate that was kept separate from the family’s dishes.

  Anna’s cleaning girl, Bessie, got a special place in the bathroom where she hung her good dress on a hook and left her street shoes in a carton below. She worked in a loose faded housedress and shoes without backs. (The pink skin of her heels looked to Anna like the pink underside of Gert’s dog.)

  Bessie was a woman who never said much. She smiled and nodded a great deal and ate silently with her special utensils, never making a sound, not even clinking her fork against her plate. She made the same brief comment to Anna every week: that she was afraid to leave the house after work because her husband had a habit of hiding in the bushes with a knife, waiting for her to come out so he could cut her up.

  Anna actually feared there would be a killing in her alley. She was afraid that when Abram insisted on walking Bessie after work to the trolley stop, Bessie’s husband would kill Abram and leave Anna a penniless widow with two children. Then, like Bessie, she’d have to go to work cleaning other people’s houses.

  Which is why—years later—Anna wanted her grown daughters to live in a good neighborhood far from where colored men waited in the bushes with knives. Even when Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, even when everyone began calling colored people “black” and then stretched it out to “African-American,” Anna could not forget the scars Bessie-from-Brooklyn had on her face, on her back, and on her arms. If violence was Bessie’s fate, Anna wanted to see to it that it was never the fate of her daughters. (How could she have known that Carol would marry a crazy white man who was far more dangerous than Bessie’s husband?)

  When Janet told Anna she and Danny were going to buy a house, Anna counted the life insurance money Abram had left her. Because her granddaughter, Bonnie, was about to enter first grade, Anna offered Janet the down payment for a house on the condition it would be in a part of the city where no men like Bessie’s husband would be lurking, in a school district that was guaranteed to be safe.

  “Mom,” Janet said, “We want our children to be comfortable with people of all races. We’d like to live in a multi-ethnic neighborhood.”

  Such fancy words everyone spouted these days: “multi-ethnic,” “rainbow coalition,” “family of man”—so many ads showing children with brown and red and yellow and white skin, all clasping their rainbow hands together. Anna didn’t really understand why yellow people, for example, didn’t just stay in yellow countries. It was true her parents had come here from another country, but they were at least the same color as those who lived in New York, where they landed. America was too good to everybody and look at the problems it caused.

  Still, maybe Anna’s urging had had some effect on her daughter, or maybe it was just what the realtor showed them, a house they fell in love with, with two orange trees in the front yard, a plum tree in the back, and a pool on the side. The school was three blocks away, across no big streets, and the neighbors were all white.

  Of course the house wasn’t in Los Angeles where Anna had her antique store, but in a city an hour to the east, a few minutes drive to the college where Danny was a teacher. Because Anna had been courageous enough to learn to drive in a matter of weeks after Abram died (otherwise she couldn’t have continued to run the antique store), she figured out a way to visit the children by driving to their house on streets that never touched a freeway. This was no easy matter, since the freeways had been designed to make a long ride across the city feasible.

  With her heart in her mo
uth, Anna set out to visit the children in their new house holding her breath all the way, knowing that human beings were not meant to speed across the surface of the earth on wheels. But when she arrived laden with rye breads and challahs from the Jewish bakery on Fairfax Avenue, the children greeted her with screams of welcome. “Mom-Mom is here! Yay! Mom-Mom is here!” To be heralded that way was almost worth the panic of the trip.

  As soon as she and Janet had piled the breads into the freezer, she would set to work on the main purpose of her visit: educating her grandchildren. Together they played “Sheriff and Deputies” (this developed their reasoning skills), and made up outrageous rhymes (this developed their verbal skills). Anna gave them a musical experience as well, playing a special song on the piano for them, the story of “The Three Princesses.” This was a tale replete with a love theme, a battle theme, a funeral theme, and a wedding march (all taken from famous pieces of music) and even (once the princess and the prince had married) a few bars of “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby!” Anna’s granddaughters were rapt when hearing the familiar tale: “There were three princesses. One was tall and thin, one was short and fat, and one was young and beautiful.” Her three granddaughters always clamored to know which one of them Anna thought was the “young and beautiful.”

  “All of you are young and beautiful,” she assured them. And they were. Anna, who was not maternal herself and did not have a soft heart and was not one to be moved by a pretty face, found herself adoring these girls with all her being. First of all, like her, they were extremely smart. Second, they were musically talented. Third, they had vocabularies like no other children their ages. She saw them as three little Annas, each one going forth in the world to spread her talents, her messages and her philosophy.

  Anna’s philosophy, which did not include the concept of “multi-ethnic,” was challenged when she learned that her down payment for the house in the good neighborhood was for naught. Almost as soon as Janet’s family moved in, the government passed a law that required her precious little girls, flesh of her flesh and mind of her mind, to be bused twenty miles to a colored neighborhood. There descendants of Bessie’s husband would share her granddaughters’ space, deform their minds, and threaten their bodies.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” Janet assured her. “This is good for them. This will help them get along in the world.” Janet—as it turned out—felt it was her obligation to keep up this fiction for years, though when Myra began to say things in Anna’s presence like, “No, I didn’t finish my fucking homework,” Janet would give Anna an apologetic glance and explain it away by saying, “It’s just what she hears all day.”

  Myra did not even apologize. “I can’t bleep out everything I say! That’s the way I think. That’s how we all talk in my school.”

  “Why not send the children to a different school? Maybe a private school?” Anna asked Janet when the children were not in the room. “I’m sure the heads of government, who passed this law, send their own children to private schools.”

  “Private school is so snobbish. And, besides, how can we afford it? Didn’t you get your schooling in public schools, Mom? Look how smart you are!”

  “In my day,” Anna said, “we were all children of immigrants and we all wanted to work hard and become good Americans.”

  “And now?”

  “Now the children in public school all want to become good dope-takers and good crooks.”

  Anna later wondered if she’d crossed the line of good taste by saying her ugly thought out loud. Her daughter had frowned, as if Anna was not as advanced in her evolution as Janet expected her to be. But Janet was not so advanced either, as it turned out. Eventually, after years of being worn down by problem after problem brought on by this busing law, she saw the light and took steps to make a change. But she refused to tell Anna which straw, exactly, had broken her camel’s back. Anna was indefatigable in wanting to know and Janet would not discuss it.

  “Do I have to be dead and buried before you tell me?” Anna had asked in irritation.

  Dead but not buried, Anna was now going to find out. In her new freedom after death, when her granddaughters were not only out of high school and college, they were almost all out of graduate school and the older two married and Jill three months pregnant, she decided to visit their schools in the years when the girls had been placed in classes that specialized in teaching them obscenities. She was avid to learn what, exactly, had happened that had finally made Janet and Danny apply to put all three of them into private school.

  She visited first the physical education class where Bonnie, on an ordinary day in ninth grade, was changing her clothes in the locker room of the girls’ gym. Because Anna’s new ghostly gifts gave her the knack of arriving, in her quest for truth, at the pivotal moment, she could see for herself, in two seconds, that the school smelled bad, was dirty and in ill repair. It hadn’t been painted in probably ten years. The water fountain drain was clogged and water sat in its basin. She wouldn’t set her body in a place like this for five minutes even if they paid her a million dollars. She saw no reason why any blood relative of hers should have to endure it either.

  Bonnie, the granddaughter who resembled Anna the most, was a beautiful and wise girl at the age of fourteen. Her distinguishing glory was that she had never had a haircut; her tresses were something to behold. Longer than her waist, her hair fell in glorious shining waves down her back.

  On this day, as she sat on a wooden bench in the locker room, tying the laces of her tennis shoes, a great lumbering colored girl passed in back of her and pulled her hair—hard.

  “Hey!” Bonnie cried, “Don’t touch me. Cut that out.”

  “Okay, bitch,” the girl said. “If you say so.”

  This girl—only a teenager but she looked like an overweight woman of forty—went to her metal locker and came back holding a huge pair of scissors. Bonnie, with her head bent again over her laces, didn’t see what was about to happen. The girl lifted a hank of Bonnie’s hair and chopped it off.

  Bonnie screamed and flung her arms up toward her head. The girl threw the clump of hair in Bonnie’s lap. “If you tell anyone, bitch, you’ll be a bloody heap of shit after school. You won’t have teeth to smile with.”

  Anna watched her darling grandchild suffering through the day, playing volleyball like a robot, her face frozen, and later having to stand up at the back of the math classroom for an entire hour (punishment meted out by her colored math teacher for coming to class thirty seconds after the bell rang). Never mind that she was late because she had been in the bathroom trying to fasten her remaining ravaged hair in a rubber band.

  At the end of the day, when she tumbled off the school bus and staggered home, her mother questioned her and got the details of the attack. Then Janet had to cut off the rest of Bonnie’s hair to make it even. This entire incident Janet carefully neglected to relay to Anna.

  That was all she had to see of the high school. Now Anna investigated the middle school. She chose to ride home on the school bus with Jill, her middle granddaughter. The driver looked to Anna like the retarded old man who used to walk in her Brooklyn neighborhood pushing a wooden cart and yelling, “I cash clothes.” The lives of all these children were in his care? It seemed outrageous that a school bus could be driven by any vagrant who had a driver’s license, any mental defective who was willing to put up with forty screaming kids while driving a rackety old bus. On the day Anna dropped into their midst, the children were imitating the noise of a herd of cows stampeding. Most of them were smashing their feet up and down on the floorboards of the tinny bus and yelling, “Moo! Moo!”

  “Attention! Attention,” the bus driver shouted on his loudspeaker system. “Let us have some order here.”

  The children drummed their feet all the louder. Jill, who was a shy child, sat nervously while, all around her, her classmates mooed and stomped their shoes. These children, Anna observed, were all white, being bused back home to their neighborhoods of origin at the
end of the school day.

  The neighborhood that Anna had campaigned for, all white, all suburban, already proved to be not so perfect. Across the street from Janet’s house, so cute with its pool and orange trees, lived a fundamentalist Christian minister who seemed to have at least two wives and a houseful of ten children. In his two upstairs bedroom windows he displayed large signs announcing: ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN.

  Whenever Janet and Danny took their daily morning walk, they would encounter their minister neighbor on the road running in his jogging suit. Every day they would greet him pleasantly, but this man of the cloth snubbed them every time. Love thy neighbor, my eye, thought Anna. She surmised that because Janet and Danny did not put out Christmas decorations, he knew they were Jewish. He no doubt hated abortion and Jews equally. Another problem with the perfect neighborhood was that Anna’s grandchildren had no friends to play with in it. As soon as busing had been made law, all the children who were school friends of Anna’s grandchildren were pulled out of public school by their parents and entered into various private schools, many of them church schools. This meant that there were no school friends for Bonnie, Jill, and Myra to befriend after school. There were no PTA meetings at which neighborhood parents might meet, and hardly any parents bothered to travel to school meetings at the public school twenty miles away. Living in a good neighborhood turned out to be as good as living in a desert.