Anna in the Afterlife

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  The driver of Jill’s bus was becoming furious as the children continued smashing the floor with ever more craziness and shouting. Another few bangs and they’d put their feet through the floorboards. Even Anna didn’t approve of this uncontrolled show of bad manners. Jill, she was pleased to notice, was not participating in this disrespect for public property. Suddenly the driver brought the bus to a screeching halt. The foreheads of the children crashed forward against the seats in front of them.

  “Out!” he yelled. “Out of the bus, right now! Everyone out!”

  Several of the children—they were all boys—jumped gleefully off the bus, but Jill sat alarmed and dumfounded in her seat at the window. She knew she would get home late, that her mother would be waiting for her at the bus stop. She was worried about worrying her mother. Anna could see this in her face.

  But the driver was livid. He could go off the deep end and kill all the children. In another life he was probably a child molester and a serial killer. He bellowed down the length of the bus: “Did you hear me? Every one of you goddamn kids—off! Right now!”

  Jill was shaking; she was only eight years old. She had never been yelled at this way. She stood trembling and got off the bus with the rest of the children.

  The lunatic bus driver shouted, “Okay, now—you little bastards run around the bus in circles till I say you can quit. Then maybe when I say we need some order on the bus, you’ll understand what I mean.”

  The bus was parked in the middle of the highway; the children were now beginning to run around it, running out in traffic, and running fast because he was shouting, “Faster! Faster!” Jill was crying and running and huffing and panting.

  At home Janet waited twenty minutes past the time the bus should have arrived and then ran back to the house and called the school.

  “My daughter never got home from school!” she cried.

  “We’ve had no word of any trouble,” the secretary in the office reported. “The bus left school on schedule. Try calling the Transportation Office.”

  Janet phoned the school board. She was transferred to the head of transportation who looked up the route she described. “Let’s see, that route is assigned an older bus—it has no radio, so I can’t check with the driver. Call me in another half hour if your daughter is not home, and I’ll send a backup person to check that route.”

  “A half hour! My daughter could be lying in a ditch by then. I’m calling the police!” Janet said. “Right now.

  The bus driver made the children run in circles for a half hour. When the police car arrived, two children were vomiting at the roadside. Janet’s little girl had twisted her ankle and was sobbing uncontrollably as she ran. Five of the boys had simply escaped, running away down the road in the direction of what they thought was home. The driver was sitting on the curb by then, swilling from a can of beer and yelling “Again, go around again!”

  The police stuck him in handcuffs and dumped him, as well they should have, in the back of the squad car. They radioed to the station and in time another bus was summoned to pick up the remaining children.

  When the bus arrived with a new, sane-looking driver, it turned out that he was so unfamiliar with the route that he got lost several times along the way. It was six P.M. before Jill was delivered into her mother’s arms. By then the whole family was home and all of them fell on Jill and embraced her and dried her tears as if she had narrowly missed being murdered. As indeed she had. And Janet—as it turned out—carefully neglected to tell Anna about this incident as well.

  Myra, Anna’s youngest little granddaughter, when she was seven, got as a Chanukah gift a white nylon ski jacket stuffed with down feathers. She had wanted this very jacket for the longest time; she had told Anna that it was her heart’s desire and she hoped her parents would someday buy it for her. “I saw it in the mall. I love how white and silky and soft it is.”

  “You don’t want down,” Anna said. “It comes from ducks. You know how dirty ducks live? They make their duty and walk around in it, it gets all over them, they stink from it. You don’t want a coat from a duck. Better would be fiberfill, what they put in pillows now. It’s washable and you don’t get allergic to it.

  Still, Jill didn’t let it rest. White ski jacket, white ski jacket was all anyone heard for months.

  And when she got it, for Chanukah that year, she wore it to school proudly, at the first of the new year—her badge of honor. With her white feathers encased in white nylon, she looked like a puffy white penguin.

  On this day she proudly wore it on the school bus (by now all the buses had radios, and the drivers went through a security background check). When she arrived at the school twenty miles away, an emergency assembly was called by the black principal. The teachers, knowing this was serious, quickly herded their classes into the auditorium. The principal stood on the stage between the American flag and the flag of the state of California and announced that someone had broken into the school office over the weekend and stolen the mimeograph machine. He wanted to know who did it. He was going to wait right there till someone told the truth. And when he found out who did it he was going to “kick the kid’s ass to high heaven.” This principal had once been a policeman and before that a professional wrestler. His primary way of dealing with the delinquents at his school was to threaten to kick their asses out of there. When no one confessed to the crime, he told them they were going to sit there all day, and miss lunch, and miss the school bus going home, and maybe even stay the night. Maybe two nights. Maybe forever.

  Several of the teachers had to comfort hysterical children who began to cry at the thought of being there all night. When the principal was satisfied he had scared them all to death, he let the teachers take them back to their rooms. When Myra took off her new down jacket in her classroom, she discovered that someone sitting behind her had written on the white nylon—with black marker pen—FUCK YOU.

  This story Janet also neglected to relay to Anna.

  One day sometime after all these incidents had occurred, Bonnie was sitting in the orthodontist’s chair (three thousand dollars it was costing to keep her teeth lined up straight) when the orthodontist beckoned Janet into his office. Anna did not approve of orthodontics. She could understand why Janet wanted her daughter to have a confident smile, but the poor child had to wear something called “head gear” that circled her head like a metal halo and was attached by clamps to her back teeth. She had to sleep in this and wear it to school, looking like a visitor from outer space. Luckily, she was not the only child to be so encumbered, but Anna thought it was a waste of money. One little crooked tooth was an adorable imperfection in an already beautiful child.

  The orthodontist said to Janet, “I’m concerned that your daughter is in public high school. She’s a very smart young lady and could get a much better education at Parkdale, the private school from which all my children graduated.” He talked as if his jaws were wired together.

  Anna was thinking, How do you know my granddaughter is so smart? When she’s in the dentist’s chair, her mouth is always open and she can’t say a word! Besides, who’s going to pay Bonnie’s tuition to private school? It’s easy for you to say—you get three thousand dollars a patient and the waiting room is always full.

  “My husband and I are actually considering private school although we hadn’t planned to,” Janet replied to the orthodontist, a handsome man with a graying mustache. “Certain recent events have made us think it’s the only solution. Our children, who all started out loving the idea of an integrated community, have had setbacks that changed their idealistic views. However, private school may be a little out of our reach, financially.”

  “Well of course they have scholarships for deserving students. Rest assured I’ll be glad to give your daughter a recommendation.”

  As it turned out, all three of Anna’s granddaughters were accepted by the fancy Parkdale private school. The girls had gotten the highest scores ever achieved by incoming students wh
o’d taken the qualifying exam. However, there was a slight problem for Bonnie, who was the oldest and would be entering tenth grade: there was not an opening for her at this time. The younger girls could be placed immediately.

  “Will there be any scholarship aid available?” Janet asked politely.

  “Not for the first year,” the director explained. “Depending on how they do, perhaps there will be some financial aid in the second year.”

  Anna could see where the rest of her savings would have to go. She thought Janet should go right back to the orthodontist, tell him what he had gotten them all into, and ask him to give them at least a big discount for straightening Bonnie’s teeth!

  Anna reached the end of her life unconvinced about the equality of man. She saw Roots (she liked Chicken George), she watched Oprah (who was turning into some kind of soapbox preacher), she saw the Olympics on TV where she admired Debbie Thomas, the powerful and graceful colored skater who was also a medical student at Stanford, but had a lower opinion of the French skater, Surya Bonaly, also a colored girl, who had a white mother as her coach and who was always doing rude back flips with her behind in the air.

  Whenever Anna passed a colored man on the street and he didn’t slash her to bits, she felt she had barely escaped with her life. If people thought she was an ugly person to think this way, it was just too bad. If they ever bothered to ask her, she’d tell them: she had her reasons.

  Anna’s Lost Brother

  OF THE LOST BOYS in Anna’s life—her stillborn son, her dead half brother, and her dead nephew—the one about whom she knew the least was Shmuel, Sammy for short, the son from her mother’s first marriage. She had only one picture of him, a sepia photo showing him in army uniform sitting on a black horse. He served as a mounted soldier in World War I, a stocky young man with close-cropped, curly dark hair. He stared into the camera with a cocky, confident demeanor. Anna simply did not remember how he really looked, though whenever she thought of him she felt a fluttering in her throat and a clutching somewhere low in her stomach. She thought it was connected with his mysterious death when she was sixteen and he twenty-five.

  “Lost at sea” was what Anna’s mother told whomever called to visit her in her grief. “My son, drowned in the ocean. Murdered by bad friends who took him fishing on Yom Kippur night.” This was impossible for Sophie to comprehend, that on a night all Jews should be at shul repenting of their sins (though what sins could a young man have?), Sam’s bad friends convinced him to go fishing. What kind of fishing at night? Who needed fish that fresh? Who goes out in the ocean in a little boat on the highest holy day of the year?

  In the months after he disappeared, it was Anna who was called to the phone to speak to police whenever a drowned man was brought to the morgue. She was the appointed, the only one in the family who could discuss the practical aspects of the matter. Sophie, who barely spoke English and who was hysterical with grief, could not be expected to travel by subway to the morgue to identify drowned men. Anna’s father, who was Sophie’s second husband and not Shmuel’s father, had little interest in Sophie’s son and his bad judgment; he was satisfied that his disappearance was retribution visited by God on the boy’s blasphemous act. Gert, who was only fourteen at the time, was far too young to be involved with such sad things. Thus it fell to Anna to go to the morgue to look at the swollen faces of drowned dead men laid out on tile tables. None of them turned out to be Sam, and, after four years had passed, Sophie was permitted to take possession of his thousand-dollar life insurance policy.

  Still, even after she collected the money, she left the porch light on every night, waiting for her son’s return. She held fast to the belief that Sam had been struck in the head by the sinking boat and had come back to consciousness somewhere in the vicinity of Coney Island. The shock had caused him to lose his memory; she told Anna she was sure he must be selling Nathan’s hot dogs on the boardwalk or working the controls of the Ferris wheel. At night he slept on the sand underneath the wooden boards with the other bums who lit fires to cook and keep warm. One day he would awaken to his true identity and come home to his mother’s arms.

  Still, when Sophie heard from an Italian lady down the street of a fortune-teller in Canarsie who could contact souls of the dead, she admitted that Sam might be in another sphere and insisted Anna take a day off from school to go with her to see the woman. Thus, on a snowy day, with the wind blasting in their faces, Anna walked with her mother to the Gravesend Avenue trolley that they took to a distant part of the city. Anna followed her mother up two flights of stairs into the living room of a woman whose entire house smelled of sardines. She was asked to wait in the kitchen with the fortune-teller’s orange cat while her mother joined hands with other needy strangers and tried to reach the spirit of her son.

  Anna did not want her mother to reach Sam. Anna did not want him back in any form, though she could not say why. She was mystified that she could not remember what he looked like, how he ate at the dinner table, the sound of his voice. Only the shine on the buckle of his belt came to her mind when she tried to picture him. It was so bright, this belt buckle, that it blotted out his face.

  Sam and Ava were the children of a philanderer and a bigamist while Anna and Gert were merely the children of a poor tailor. When Sophie first came to America, a girl of seventeen, she met the bigamist in a butcher store, a man with a fancy name, Bertram Buttenwieser, a man with gold rings on three fingers and a beard streaked with gray hairs. He told her he was an aristocrat. (What did she know from aristocrats?) He said he spoke seven languages. He promised her he was expecting a shipment of diamonds from Hungary soon, and how—after they were married—he would buy her a fine house and put diamonds in the buckles of her shoes.

  Sophie married him in a storefront shul, with a bearded old rabbi mumbling the prayers, with no one in her family there. She lived with him in a tenement, where the toilet had to be shared with three families down the hall and where Sophie spent many nights and days alone while Bertram was out, as he said, “attending to business.” She bore him two children, one after the other, Ava and Sam—the brother and sister Anna thought of as “the other family” not her family, having almost nothing to do with her.

  She had one image in her mind whenever she thought of her mother’s first life, before she and Gert came along. Her mother had described it this way: Bertram had not been home for two days. There was no food on the table, none in the cupboard. The children were hungry, the rent was due.

  In the fish market where Sophie went to beg a carp on credit, a woman told Sophie: “You should ask the baker what his daughter is doing these days.”

  “What do you mean?” Sophie asked her.

  “I mean, you should ask

  On this night, which was Friday night, the shabbes, when Jewish tables were set with the best lace tablecloths and silver, Sophie left her older girl with a neighbor and took Sam, the baby, and ran through the streets to the house of the baker who lived in the basement apartment of a tenement building. As Sophie approached, she could see his lit windows, and inside, the handsomely set kitchen table.

  And there, at the table, she saw her husband, Bertram Buttenweiser, and beside him, the beautiful baker’s daughter, her eyes downcast, her long lashes visible even though the glass.

  Sophie saw this with her own eyes and heard with her ears, through the partly open window, heard her husband singing the praises of the young girl. She was modest, he said, and beautiful, and had big hips for bearing children, and knew how to cook, and most of all how to bake delicious cakes. With her own ears, Sophie heard her husband ask the baker for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  Such a fury propelled Sophie down the steps to the door of the apartment that she couldn’t stop herself from flinging it open to confront the dinner guests.

  “This man,” she screamed, pointing at Bertram, “is my husband. And this child,” she said, thrusting Shmuel into the light, “is his son!”

  Anna knew the rest
of the story as if it had happened to her. The terrible scene that ensued, Bertram’s denial, his calling Sophie a crazy woman he never saw before in his life. How later that night, Bertram came home and packed up all his clothes, cursed Sophie’s black and ugly heart, and disappeared forever.

  Sophie put both Sam and Ava into an orphanage and found work being the helper of a midwife. In time, she learned the art of delivering babies herself and eventually was able to take her children back. When she had saved enough money to pay for a “get”—a Jewish divorce—she declared herself free of Bertram. Three months after having the document signed by the rabbi, she learned that Bertram had died the year before in a diabetic coma.

  In contrast to her mother’s hardships, Anna’s life seemed relatively uneventful. Abram had turned up on her front porch in Brooklyn, brought along by a friend as an extra man for a party Gert was having, brought along in fact for Gert, who never forgave Anna for what happened next: that Abram fell in love with her and married her.

  When Anna was already a grandmother, Janet—with her open-minded ways—developed a friendship with a lesbian woman named Lee whom she had met at the community college where Danny taught. The woman was doing a project for a night class whose subject involved eliciting oral histories from old ladies. One day she confronted Anna, who was sitting in Janet’s kitchen, teaching the girls how to memorize piano notes on the staff: E G B D F = Every Good Boy Does Fine.

  “Janet’s told me a little about your life, Anna, how you grew up in an immigrant family, how you always wanted to be cultured, how talented you were at the piano but never were able to get a proper education. Would you be willing to talk to me about your life history?”

  Anna considered this request. She had nothing against lesbians, except she never understood how they viewed other women. Was Janet a sex object to this woman or just a plain friend? How could you ever know what was in her mind? And what if she wanted to take Janet’s girls out to the park or somewhere—could she be trusted?