Anna in the Afterlife

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  On the other hand, Anna liked to talk about herself (she was well-spoken and could express herself eloquently) so she said she was willing to tell her story. She sat there for an hour while Lee grilled her about her history—her family, her habits, her attitudes toward men, toward money, toward food.

  “Food I can take or leave,” Anna told her. “I never enjoyed food. Everything made with garlic or onions I hate. I hate meat, all that fat and gristle. In fact, I could do without food for good, it’s just an inconvenience.”

  “So you don’t like food.” Lee was making notes in her notebook. “Do you like men?”

  “Who thinks about men anymore?” Anna snapped back. “At my age?”

  “At any age? Did you ever like them at any age?”

  Janet, who was doing something at the sink, called over, “My mother was always a glamour girl, Lee. She had the world’s most beautiful legs. Men were gathered on the front porch like bees to honey.”

  “And I sprayed them with DDT,” Anna remarked.

  “So,” Lee said, taking more notes. “And did you like sex?” Lee asked her. The nerve of the woman. And with Anna’s young granddaughters wandering in and out of the kitchen.

  “Like it, not like it, it’s a fact of life, it sits there like the nose on your face.”

  “A person could have a nose job,” Lee said. “Not that I would.”

  “Nothing is wrong with my nose,” Anna told her.

  “Mrs. Goldman, do you consider yourself an affectionate person?”

  This Janet answered for Anna. “If you mean is my mother a huggy, kissy type? She definitely is not. She’s all business.”

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Goldman,” the interrogator said, “but I must ask you this. Were you ever sexually abused as a child?”

  All three of Anna’s granddaughters—who happened to be in the room just then—looked at their grandmother’s face, waiting for an answer.

  “Why would you ask that!” Anna asked, angry now. “How does your mind work? Maybe this is the end of the interview, if you don’t mind.”

  “Ma,” Janet said, trying to placate her. “Lee has had some problems of that nature in her life. Maybe she just wonders if you might have had some, also. These days we’re learning that it wasn’t such a rare occurrence in a family.”

  “I’m in therapy now about my abuse,” the lesbian told Anna, “I can talk about it freely. In fact, that’s what is helping me to be healed. And in a way, I think you exhibit the classic symptoms of someone who has been sexually abused. No enjoyment of food. Recoiling from physical affection. These are prime markers…”

  “I watch Oprah, too,” Anna said. “I think it’s all cooked up—everyone suddenly remembers someone peeked at them in the bathtub and they rush to call the police and arrest everyone in the family.”

  “It’s quite normal to be defensive,” Lee said. “I forgive you for your anger. No one wants to admit their privacy was violated by someone they trusted.”

  Anna stood up. “Don’t psychoanalyze me anymore,” Anna said. “It’s making me nauseated. The interview is over.”

  This idea, however, sat in Anna’s mind like an ugly bug. She went to see her sister Gert to ask her what she might remember about their childhood and if any men had ever done anything bad to either of them.

  “Who told you something?” Gert said, suddenly on guard.

  “No one told me something. I’m asking you to tell me something.”

  “It’s not about Sam, is it?”

  “I didn’t say anything about Sam. I can’t even remember Sam.”

  “I remember him perfectly. He was such a handsome boy, he had such strong arms and shoulders. But why are you asking—did someone tell you something about Sam?”

  “What has he got to do with anything? Did he do something bad?”

  “If he did, it wasn’t his fault,” Gert said. “Mama allowed him to sleep with us when he came home on leave from the army. We had no extra beds, we had to share.”

  “He slept with us?”

  “You can’t really blame him,” Gert said. “He was young and healthy, Mama put him in a little narrow bed with you, you were already twelve, sometimes he slept with me, it’s human nature, maybe he didn’t even know he was doing it.”

  “Doing what, Gert?”

  “Whatever he was doing with us.”

  “What was he doing, Gert? What are you saying?”

  “One morning Mama got very angry. She was changing the sheets on my bed. Maybe she saw something.”

  “Saw what?”

  “A stain, something funny. She took me aside and said ‘Did Sam touch you during the night?’ And I told her, ‘Maybe he did. I thought it was his thumb.’ “

  “His thumb!”

  “It wasn’t his thumb, Anna. So what did I know? He probably couldn’t help it, being so close in bed with a girl.”

  “With his sister!”

  “Half sister,” Gert corrected her. “So it’s only half as bad as you think it is.”

  “You think he did something sexual to you…and it doesn’t bother you?”

  “I’ve had two husbands,” Gert said. “Men can’t help themselves. They’re all animals. They get more enjoyment from it than we do.”

  “How often did Mama let Sam sleep with me?” Anna demanded.

  “Water under the bridge,” Gert said. “Forget about it, Anna. He drowned at sea. Let him rest in peace.”

  “He didn’t drown at sea, not the way you think,” Anna said. “When I visited Ava in Miami Beach she told me something that was kept a secret from you and from Mama. Our brother Sam was no angel the night he died. And no fisherman, either. He was a common criminal, if you want to know the truth. He was running rum up the coast, he was shot down that night by the Coast Guard. They were trying to stop the boat.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Anna. It was Yom Kippur. He was fishing with his friends. It was a stormy night. A wave capsized the boat. Everyone knows the story.”

  “What you know is a fairy tale, Gert. Bullets from the Coast Guard sank the boat.”

  “Bullets!”

  “So now we’re even, aren’t we Gert? You gave me Sam’s thumb and I gave you Sam’s bullets.”

  For once Gert had nothing to say. For once Anna didn’t either. The sisters looked at one another till something settled in their minds, took its ugly place with the other miseries of their lives. When it was registered, recognized, stamped in memory, Gert said to Anna, “I’ll make us a cup of tea now. Yes?”

  The Desert of the Mysteries

  THE MAIN PROBLEM with marriage, Anna thought, was that it put an end to looking further. When Abram took her to see the musical The Desert Song, she listened to the tenor’s honeyed voice croon, “The desert is waiting, come dear with me, I’m longing to teach you love’s sweet mysteries…” and decided then and there she might as well let Abram be the one to show them to her. Something notable had to have inspired all those movies and the love poems Gert was always clipping from the newspapers. The tragic arias of every opera depended on love’s mysteries, and Chopin’s heart had to have been in this desert when he wrote his nocturnes. Though Anna had no patience for sentimental nonsense and scorned Gert’s habit of pressing flowers in her “Thought for the Day Album,” she knew at one time or another she’d have to choose some man and go with him to those vaunted places.

  The lawyers in the offices where she worked were always after her—they smelled of starched shirts and the ink that oozed from their signatures onto their desk blotters. She imagined that life with a lawyer would be one long contract with many stipulations. She didn’t want to marry anyone smarter than she (or who thought he was) or with more education. The man she finally chose—when he turned up on the front porch of the Brooklyn house, brought along as Gert’s blind date for the party she and her friends were giving—seemed shy, pliable, agreeable, unthreatening, and had a sweet, winsome smile. He looked, in fact, a little like Clark Gable.

  When, on the
night of Gert’s party, Anna came home from dinner with yet another dull lawyer, she discovered Abram rocking rhythmically on the porch glider, smoking a pipe that smelled of butterscotch tobacco, and keeping himself hidden from the noise and chatter inside the house.

  She gave him the barest nod and went upstairs to change her clothes—or so she had always thought. This meeting with Abram was the part of the story she and Gert always fought over: Gert swore Anna went upstairs after her date and then came down in her negligee, with her hair loosed from their pins and flowing down her back. As Anna remembered it, she had changed into a blouse and tailored slacks and had left her hair in a bun. But—whatever the case—she surely had every right that night to step outside on her own front porch to take the night air. Gert argued for the rest of her life that Anna had ruined her chances, that Abram would have married her if not for Anna’s turning up at that moment and showing herself off in a sheer nightgown.

  To clear things up for herself, Anna—with the special privileges of the unburied dead—now had a chance to revisit the scene and see the truth for herself. She came back on this particular spring evening. The house was bright with noise and the voices of strangers; Anna saw, for one thing, that the lilac tree was in full bloom and heavy with clusters of fragrant blossoms. Anna had never paid attention to nature. A tree was a tree and a bird a bird; if the tree didn’t fall on her and the bird didn’t deposit its droppings on her head, she had nothing against them. Flowers in general always seemed a waste to her: on the bush they withered and died (especially gardenias, which had no useful life span at all), whereas cut and given as a gift, flowers were also useless. You had to put them in a vase and a few days later you had green slimy water to dispose of as well as the flowers themselves.

  Yet, this night, as she came up the walk with David Bloomenstein, an attorney at her firm, a man with acne and a left thumbnail black with fungus, she was overpowered by the sweetness of the lilac blooms. She staggered a little at the onslaught, as if a drug had been given her.

  A short time before, at dinner with David Bloomenstein, he had proposed marriage and had the nerve to try to force a diamond ring upon her. He guaranteed the ring had no time limit on it: she could take forever to decide when (or if) they would marry. He said he was sure she would learn to love him. Anna had adamantly refused the ring. He refused to take it back. She insisted that he must or she would leave it on the table at the Chinese restaurant among the shards of their fortune cookies. He said he didn’t want it if she wouldn’t accept it—it was meant only for her. She dropped it on the white tablecloth: “Then let the Chinks have it!”

  She thought “Chinks” was a word anyone would use, indicating both the restaurant and the Chinese who ran it, but from the look of dismay on David Bloomenstein’s face, she knew she had said something ugly. If she wanted to think of the owners as “Chinks,” it was her business. She didn’t care for such fussy sensibilities in a man, and she refused to be disapproved of.

  Still, she could tell there’d been a fatal error, not that she cared. The lawyer took her home, anyway, coldly but politely escorting her to her front door. When he dropped her arm and bid her good-bye, she stood on the porch till he drove away. She had to compose her face for going into the house where a foolish party was in full swing. She could hear charades being played inside, and dance music was on the Victrola. At that moment she saw the ruby glow of a match held over the bowl of a pipe and heard the strong inhalation of a man’s breath as he lit his tobacco.

  Anna, with not a romantic cell in her body, felt her bones turn gelatinous. What he said to her, what she said to him, she could not remember (and could not make out even now, in her visitation): but she remembered the deepness of his voice, the way it vibrated through the floorboards of the porch and into the core of her being.

  Her high heels were pinching her toes; she told him (she didn’t yet know his name) she would come out again as soon as she changed her clothes. Inside the house the party was raucous, a circus of jokers and teasers, a bunch of young men from the neighborhood, fellows without a brain in their heads trying to impress Gert and her girlfriends who were in a club they called “The Sorority.”

  Anna went upstairs. She passed Mama’s room where Mama sat on the side of her bed, soaking her feet in a pan of hot water. She went into the room she shared with Gert (the big front room was rented out to Mr. Vicci, the boarder, who paid $2 rent each month), and she took off her heels, her stockings, her suit jacket (still pinned to it was the orchid corsage David Bloomenstein had given her). Her skirt, her slip, her underwear, they all came off—she felt she could breathe once the elastic stopped pinching her. Then she put on…(here Anna looked closely, to find out the truth of the matter once and for all)…her peignoir set! So Gert was right! The historical truth was that she had gone back downstairs in her sheer nightgown. But of course with a matching robe over it. There was nothing untoward to be seen, just a shimmer of mauve chiffon robe over a lighter lavender chiffon gown. (Who had given her this honeymoon set, and when? She could not recall.) And—this was also true: she let down her hair. Well, why wouldn’t she, with the pins sticking in her scalp, and the hair pulled taut around her forehead? She could feel the relief even now, as she shook it loose and it tumbled over her shoulders.

  She passed through the crowd of party-makers without a glance toward them (if Gert saw her, it couldn’t be helped, could it?) and went out to the front porch.

  Abram’s long legs made the porch seem small—she had to step over them to take a seat on the wicker chair. They talked a little: nice night, nice party. They exchanged names. After a while Abram said, “I don’t really know your sister, you know, so I wonder if you think it would be alright for me to ask you something. Someone gave me a pair of tickets to the ice rink on Ocean Parkway.” He fished around in his jacket pocket and held them up for her to see. “Are you game to go ice skating with me?”

  “I don’t skate,” she said.

  “Me neither,” he said, and laughed. She realized this was a man she could manage. She knew the tickets had been brought along for Gert. He had moved fast, even though he talked in a slow Jimmy Stewart drawl. She was still arranging her frothy nightgown around her legs and already they had a date. So there it was. The famous thing that happened to other people had happened to Anna: love at first sight.

  Gert liked to say after the wedding that Anna never wanted to be married. Otherwise, why had she burst into tears after the ceremony in the living room and run upstairs, her lace handkerchief to her mouth? Why did she go to pieces while all the guests were still there? (Years later, Gert told Anna’s daughters she thought she knew why. She told them their mother was afraid of what Abram would say when he discovered she wasn’t a virgin!) Gert and her salacious mind! Prurient Gert! Anna could never get over the vulgarity of her sister. To whom could she possibly have “given” her virginity? And why would she have? Sex was the furthest thing from her mind, then, now, and all the years in between. She was crying on her wedding night, all right, but crying for a different reason entirely. In “The Desert Song” the lovers flee into the night on their camel; they don’t have to live crowded into the same house with the bride’s old mother and her old maid sister. That’s why she was crying! Heartsick in the realization that she wasn’t going into the desert of the mysteries with her handsome lover, but back into the bedroom next to her mother’s now that Mr. Vicci, the boarder, had been evicted.

  Anna and Abram were forced to run away to Cleveland to get some privacy. Where was Cleveland? Anna, who disdained geography, had no idea, except that it was far away from Gert and Mama in Brooklyn. Abram’s job, selling pajamas in the men’s department of Abraham and Straus, did not hold much promise for the future. She had resisted Abram’s proposition that they go and find their fortunes further west until the morning Mama opened their bedroom door (“Don’t pay attention to me, I’m just here to get your laundry”) just as Abram was lifting Anna to get her poised on top of him because
he told her she’d have more feeling that way.

  Her anger, not her shame, was the thing that convinced her she wanted to leave—anger at her mother and Gert for having to live with them, anger at her father for dying young, anger at Abram for not being satisfied to do it in the dark, in the night, under the blanket, the usual way, and anger at herself for letting him get her into such a compromising position in a room that had no lock on the door.

  Together they looked at road maps to Cleveland where Abram had heard from his brother Sol there were certain opportunities having to do with gambling machines. Sol was already out there doing business. He was sure Abram and he could make some money together. Abram, who was looking for his life’s work, thought this might be it.

  “Don’t worry about Mama and Gert,” he assured Anna. “We’ll send them money for rent and food the whole time we’re away, and if—after I learn the ropes—the business works out there, I’ll set up the same business back here in Brooklyn.”

  This Abram of hers hadn’t just married her. He had married the lot of them: Gert and Mama, too. He’d taken on their full support. Was he made out of pure gold, her husband? My God, how Anna resented his goodness. She wanted her own life even if it meant leaving her mother and sister to fend for themselves. But Abram wouldn’t think of it. He was a better man than she. He was too good to be true. Even if he had enjoyed a few burlesque shows in his day, even if she knew he had a pack of playing cards of naked women in his handkerchief drawer, even if he thought Anna should have more feeling in bed, how could she hold it against him?

  For her, indignation was a natural reaction. She found it a relief to hold everything against everyone—it was almost her religion. For reasons she did not question, her life energy had been powered by fury. She was actually surprised (now that she was dead) that it hadn’t kept her living forever. She crackled like a burning bush, throwing flames at the world for not letting her get educated, for not giving her the best piano teacher, for not introducing her to a rich and important husband, for making her take care of these two helpless women. If she’d married a rich lawyer she’d have a house with a decorator by now. She was angry at herself that no lawyer had ever appealed to her as much as Abram. She was seduced and attracted by his gentleness and kindness and therefore angry at him the rest of her life for having so much of those qualities that he never got ahead in the world.