The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “And please stop doing that. It’s disgusting,” Sadie says. “I’ve left you food for this week. Market before you run out.”

  “Me? I got work to do. I work.”

  “Celia’s not going to do it.”

  Celia is in the back garden, the light now a thickening yellow: from the kitchen window she appears slightly gilded, weeding the snapdragon bed.

  “No,” Jo says.

  “Who’s going to do it?”

  Jo stubs out her cigarette in the sink.

  “Goldie’s gone,” Sadie says.

  But Jo stands at the sink watching Celia through the window, absently fingering the wet tobacco, and it seems she has left the room.

  SADIE VISITS and revisits the stark police precinct, sometimes bringing bakery sweets, which have the effect of increased friendliness but no Goldie. She places classified ads in Rochester and Cleveland, New York and Chicago. There is nothing, though by late July the telephone’s become tyrannical: inane calls from Lancaster, two or three times a day (Irving’s drinking, Jo’s annoyed, no one made Shabbos dinner); and nagging calls from her mother-in-law, whose sufferings calcified long ago. Once Sadie’s called to retrieve Celia from a barbershop, where Celia has followed a stranger—a handsome one—and stationed herself. No word from Goldie, or anyone who knows Goldie. Once a day, Sadie lets herself fall on the sofa and wills the world to stop. The world does not respond. After ten minutes she’s up again, in search of the armoring lipstick and her shoes, and maybe one of those bakery treats.

  At least she has the separation of neighborhoods, of her house itself, some measure of privacy—yet even that is subject to interruption. In early August, weeks after Goldie’s disappearance, Bill announces, “We’ll be having dinner with my mother and Mrs. Teitelbaum on Thursday, Sadie. You know the sort of things she likes.”

  Sadie’s at her writing desk, addressing letters to police departments in Syracuse and Albany and Toronto. Why should she entertain anyone now? Not to mention that it’s hot, and Mother Feldstein likes heavy dinners. Yet it seems simpler, really, to cook the dinner than to argue or to defer any longer. Sadie will come up with something, though at the moment she won’t answer Bill: she dislikes his planning by fiat, and she will make sure the words Syracuse and Police are beautiful.

  On Thursday Sadie roasts a brisket for her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s fusty companion, Rose Teitelbaum. Bill is late from work, and Mother Feldstein arrives first, followed by an asphyxiating cloud of cologne and a squinting Mrs. Teitelbaum. Within minutes—four, actually, as Sadie’s begun to time her mother-in-law—it’s clear that Mother Feldstein does not like the aqua davenport, a color she finds alternately clownish and risqué; or the fresh lemonade which is apparently too lemony. She somehow manages a second glass after Bill arrives, which is when— twenty-one minutes into the visit—Sadie detects a smile. Mrs. Teitelbaum quietly demolishes the plate of hors d’oeuvres, and speaks to Sadie only when Mother Feldstein is focused on her son. The subject is the season, which is Rose Teitelbaum’s second least favorite, the very least favorite being winter, the most favorite being not a season at all but the second week in September, which happens to coincide with Mrs. Teitelbaum’s birthday. At the dinner table, Mrs. Teitelbaum accepts a large helping of brisket and then, in whispered tones, complains of excessive summer perspiration.

  No one speaks about Goldie. No one. How is it possible? Sadie’s not about to invite Mother Feldstein’s speculations, but wouldn’t her mother-in-law say something? True, Mother Feldstein lost her own sister years ago to influenza, which was tragic, terrible, but no one questions the whereabouts of dear Aunt Ida now. Maybe if Goldie’s fate were known for sure, Mother Feldstein and Mrs. Teitelbaum would inquire. Maybe. Instead they frown, pointedly it seems. The third time Mother Feldstein frowns in the direction of the aqua davenport Sadie wonders—is she herself unbalanced to wonder?—if Mother Feldstein sees not a sofa but evidence of the Cohens’ moral failings. Goldie’s had the poor judgment to disappear, and Sadie is, after all, her sister. Just look at that davenport.

  True, Sadie is on edge. She determinedly serves up the chocolate cake, which Mother Feldstein eats but does not criticize or praise, instead smiling at Bill and holding his hand and ignoring her. After coffee, Bill walks arm in arm with his mother to her taxicab—they’re cozy together—and Mrs. Teitelbaum follows, leaning into Sadie. Both women offer Sadie perfunctory kisses on the cheek, and she resists the impulse to wipe her face.

  The evening has apparently not dampened Bill’s mood. In spite of everything, he’s buoyant. Isn’t that one of the reasons she married him, his buoyancy? Once in the bedroom, he seems interested in her shoes, now off her feet; he finds them adorably small. The interest travels to her feet, her stockinged legs. Her body pleases him and she likes her own shapeliness, the way dresses and suits fit her, but how she got this particular body is a matter she had nothing to do with. And it has an odd power she can’t control. For example, the way the simple gesture of taking off stockings affects her husband: it makes him amorous, the dressing and undressing she does—just look at his eyes, the band’s in full swing—though to her it feels no different from the dressing and undressing she has done since childhood. And how anyone can feel amorous after three hours with those women is a mystery. Sadie sits up and brushes off her dress and kisses her husband. He is the most familiar of strangers.

  WHEN SADIE and Bill are called to Niagara Falls, she tells no one.

  “I can go without you,” Bill says. “No reason for you to go too.” Sunlight through the window reflects off his glasses—it’s hard to see his eyes—but his tone is commanding. This is a tone he sometimes takes, and Sadie often pretends to heed: he’s stubborn and she finds ways around him. But she can be stubborn too. She climbs into the car and says nothing, and he drives. A herd of clouds covers the western sky, keyhole patches of blue emerging to the north and east. At the morgue they are led to the bloated body of a woman, drowned, found at the edge of the whirlpool rapids. Brunette, probably in her thirties. A suicide? No one can say. She has not been embalmed; from five yards away, the stench is overwhelming. Before Sadie even sees the face, she knows it is not Goldie. The body is too tall, the hair even now closer to dishwater blond. Still, Sadie forces herself to look. The face is swollen, disfigured, the hair matted, but you can see she’s someone else, Irish maybe: an unclaimed Irish stranger. It’s hard to breathe, hard to move. Sadie studies the woman-turned-grotesque as if mesmerized.

  “Okay then, let’s go,” Bill says. “Come on, Sadie.”

  But her husband seems remote, as if he is calling from another room, as if in this room there is only Sadie and the drowned woman, a woman not Goldie.

  “Sadie?”

  And Sadie recognizes in herself the absurd desire to speak to the woman, to utter some mix of What happened? and I’m sorry and listen for a response. Before she turns away, impulsively she touches the woman’s arm.

  “ YOU GET these ideas,” Bill says. They’re in the Ford again.

  She isn’t listening. The woman’s anonymity is terrible, it’s all putrid and terrible, the silence, the woman’s state. Sadie doesn’t even know how to think of her, except as the drowned woman, as a drowned not-Goldie, and this is unacceptable. Now that they know of her, they should not abandon her: she needs proper care, proper burial. These are Sadie’s recurring thoughts, the ones she spoke aloud to Bill, who seems prepared to let the drowned woman drown.

  “Sadie?” Bill says. “The answer is no. I can’t pay for something like that.”

  “Sadie?” And now the tone is coaxing. “Darling, this person is not your sister. You can’t even know how to bury her.” And here he has a point: she’s almost certainly Gentile. Maybe Catholic, maybe Lutheran, but not Jewish. “You can’t go around claiming other people’s dead,” Bill says.

  It’s true, the stranger is someone else’s dead, but she is unclaimed: is that why Sadie touched her? The woman seemed so enormously sad
, or perhaps the sadness was the absence of the woman within the body. Sadie knows that touching doesn’t comfort the dead, and how could it comfort Sadie herself? Was it, then, to confirm that the woman did not still live, the way children touch dead squirrels—to see what happens? Nothing happens except the contact itself, and now Sadie carries with her this touch, this absence, this awareness of the woman who is not. And even though Sadie’s washed her hands, the morgue smell seems to be on her.

  “This isn’t like you,” Bill says. “When we get home, why don’t you sleep?”

  SHE SLIPS OFF her shoes in the bedroom, but does not undress, rests in her suit dress and stockings, ready to answer the next call. Sadie does not put much stock in dreams, but she can’t ignore the one in which her legs wither, and she does not want that dream again. It returned last week, in the August heat: she woke to the hazy sensation that her legs had given out altogether. As if she’d been walking interminably and finally could move her legs only by pushing them with her hands. She woke intact, slid out of bed and paced the room, testing each muscle; a creeping strangeness? No. They were ordinary capable legs. It’s only the dream legs she has to watch out for, and perhaps keeping her clothes on will help remind her. Still, it would not surprise her to discover, one afternoon, that her legs are made of paper and disintegrate in rain.

  “You have to be more sensible,” Bill says. He’s in his undershirt, impatient, frowning. “What are you doing?”

  Apparently she’s flexing her legs. There’s a rhythm to the flexing and relaxing, something iambic. “It’s an exercise,” she says. “For ballet.” Sadie’s seen a few performances, hasn’t she? She switches to pointing her toes. She does not tell Bill about the dream, or mention the waking impulse to fall, which arrives in dizzy irresistible waves.

  Subsequent afternoons in the city, Sadie imagines she sees Goldie. One day she recognizes what might be the dead woman’s sister: widely spaced blue eyes, dishwater hair going gray, Irish tilt to the nose. Visible without the water-mottling, freckles.

  The freckled woman is not the last she and Bill are called to view. “Maybe you can identify this one,” the shift officers say. “Maybe this one’s yours.” Women die all the time, it seems.

  CHAPTER 5

  Goldie

  I.

  1928

  Hours flaking at the edges then cracking through, the bits flaking further and dissolving: during her mother’s last days the names of the world seemed to slide away. Time and light and sound seemed to collide, and Goldie developed a deaf ear. Which seemed the sanest course, given the splintered orchestra of family sounds and the eerie chiming of spoons against medicine bottles, glasses of water ringing. In silence, Goldie bathed her mother and most afternoons held her mother’s hand, sometimes talking, sometimes not, and her mother sweated and watched the changing light and slept, and the silence seemed a shared, more benevolent country. Then Sadie would arrive and take over, and Goldie would sleep. She didn’t anticipate that the deafness would continue beyond her mother’s death, yet if anything it deepened: Jo and Celia opened and closed their mouths and Goldie attached herself to the silences, the pauses and missed beats and long soundless stretches when the talking was done.

  She was mired. The Lancaster house had mired her just as it had mired her mother. She was not supposed to notice the mired-ness, the way the housekeeping had fallen to her, the cooking and marketing, the watch-guarding of Celia, just as she was not supposed to mention her father’s cruelty, his philandering in plain view. In the mornings when Goldie combed Celia’s hair, Celia squirmed and resisted the small hairbrush, the simple comb: Don’t let it touch my neck, it mustn’t touch my neck. Goldie moved her hands gingerly, considered the pink strips of light on the Bermans’ roof. Sometimes her father spoke to her, sometimes Jo spoke. Most of what they said did not require a reply, and her father, shameless with Lillian Schumacher, did not deserve one. Still, there was never enough silence. Even when the house was empty of family, a low buzzing remained, a pervasive, staticky hum. Perhaps it emanated from Celia. Perhaps Celia was just the one most affected; after the funeral, she’d taken to sleeping in their mother’s sickroom, which now seemed coated with dissonance. Goldie tried to imagine the buzzing and family voices as water; in water she could hear the beginnings of silence.

  It was better, of course, to leave the house. She resumed her job at the library, where no one squawked or tugged at her and silence was revered. Even in winter she walked the city, where silence flourished below the noise, both profound noise and its opposite occupying construction sites. She took a streetcar up to the Falls, to the obliterating sounds of Niagara, and the vast rapids and the ragged ice floes and the silence they contained. And there was Daniel, always there was Daniel.

  Returning to the house, she withdrew into her body. Ignored the others, played the piano to drown them out, occasionally dropping the tempo and letting the notes hang. The snow finally melted. At the late edge of day she stepped out to the yard, attended to birdcalls. Clouds matted and fell into other clouds, piling up across evening, briefly infused with violet and fuchsia before melting into an opaque low-slung night.

  In the silence, she heard trains.

  II. FIRST ARRIVAL

  1901

  At the pier the air smelled of illness and brine. She did not remember her father, though she could see he was waiting for her to speak: for too long she hesitated and a sourness crossed his face. He wore a suit finer than the suits she’d seen, gray wool with a vest and pocket watch; he spoke more English than Yiddish, words like hail, melting before she could know their shape. Her mother’s face puckered in concentration and he shifted to Yiddish and lowered his voice. Then he stood between them, steering them through the crowd, and she tried to slip around to her mother, and he held her shoulder in place.

  He smelled of tobacco and pencil shavings, laundry soap, sweat rinsed with spice, but the scent didn’t match his expression. The sourness did not leave her father but in those first weeks solidified into a stern chill, and she later supposed he could not forgive her for the moment in New York when she gazed at him so blankly. Or perhaps for the fact that she remained a daughter and not a son, as if a fraud had been perpetrated; or because she was scrawny for a five-year-old, often taken for three; or because poor, ramshackle Dinivitz—and the whole, bleak Ukraine—had indelibly marked her; or because he could not find enough of himself in her face. At that first meeting, she had a smell: she’d been ill on the boat, both she and her mother, and they still stank like barn-yard, with no chance to bathe before the long, feverish train ride to Buffalo.

  Over a decade she found that slices of herself were missing, and she imagined her body to be a variegation of solid stripes and empty space, like a wrought-iron fence. There were the babies, that cycle of her mother’s belly rising and the new squalling babies turned to toddlers and climbing and clinging; and sometimes miscarriages, and her mother sick; and more new babies, all of them it seemed eating her mother alive and starting in on Goldie.

  Even then, the first desire was to be with her mother, the second to be invisible. It was difficult to hide completely, but she found ways. You could leave your body without the family noticing, as long as your hands were occupied. A hiding different from Russian hiding with her mother, which had been at once safer and more dangerous. Her uncles had doted on her mother and on Goldie but their village seemed now a gray blur against a chalk sky: still she wore plain dresses and braided her hair. In Buffalo she perfected her English and could speak without accent, as she had perfected phrases in Russian, another language of disguise.

  For years she liked to hide in the storage closet and read in the puddle of light from the hallway. In the warm seasons she used the garden shed, but Jo and Celia followed her whenever they were not affixed to her mother, who was tending to a younger infant. And when Celia’s tantrums began, Goldie would be left to watch the milder ones, or sent to the market or the neighbors’, which meant giving up her mother a
ltogether.

  Eventually there was a piano, which her father approved of as long as she played florid romantic pieces without error. In summer vegetable gardening, though she had to supervise Celia, which meant always paying attention. Sleep seemed a reprieve, and as a young woman she wondered if there were a difference, really, between dead and sleeping. Of course her mother was here, this side of dead, and on rare occasions they took an afternoon, a couple of hours to sit and drink tea, or in fine weather stroll through Delaware Park, and once even visited the Falls, and were happy.

  III. DANIEL

  1929

  Desire flared in Goldie when she was pouring water, lifting the white pitcher, one hand in the stream; her skin jumped the way it did when Daniel touched her, an all-day ache. Every week this desire and every week the waiting, interminable. Desire flared and she was no longer Goldie, a scrap of wood inside a dress, but instead a ribbon of light above the lake, a swimming in water and orange air and shadow. On Wednesdays she went to Daniel. He touched her, her skin jumped, that’s all she wanted—for him to keep touching her. Three o’clock Wednesday his father left to practice with his string quartet: three o’clock Wednesday they had the house, Daniel’s narrow bed, thickets of clouds out the second-floor window, three o’clock he undressed her, she arched toward him, three o’clock they’d couple, heat and tang of his skin, rhythmic thrust, Wednesday his mouth on her breasts and throat, Wednesday his walnut eyes. Two hours. A clear pocket of time before his father returned, before she left through the front door, as if from her piano lesson, into the stark evening.

  Some days she was overcome by his voice alone—Daniel’s voice uttering the most mundane of sentences, simply asking the time— as if she were breathing ether. He wanted to marry her, but what could he foresee? What he knew was the ecstasy of love-making, piano sonatas, the quiet of his father’s house, not the chaos and chafing and illness delivered with infants, or the ways men wander.