The One-Star Jew: Stories

by Evanier, David

  After a few moments she says, looking at us, “What should I do? Go in a nursing home, a hospital, or stay suffering as I am? Prowling the apartment all night, or my body lying in a pool of sweat? I tell God every night: ‘I’m going to sleep. Don’t let me stand up.’ But he don’t listen to me. Maybe my contract isn’t up.” She looks at us and extends her hands: “My friends what I got.”

  My wife gets up to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Blocker says to me: “Watch her like you watch your eyes. An angel!”

  We lead her into the living room where our presents are on the table: cans of salmon and gefilte fish, and a picture book of Israel. She hesitates, uncertain: “I don’t know the rules.”

  She sits on the sofa, and we are on each side of her. We open the presents for her. She leafs through the Israel book, and we read the captions to her. I think of her arthritic hands and say, “I hope you’ll be able to hold the book …”

  Misunderstanding or not, she answers, pressing the book against her breast, “I’ll hold it to my heart, under my pillow at night, that’s how I will hold it.

  “You’re my son, Brucele.”

  XXVI

  We have been visiting Mrs. Blocker for two years when Sammy, her son, dies of cancer.

  The doctor has now diagnosed the wart on Mrs. Blocker’s face as cancer. She is taken to the hospital every morning in an ambulance for radiation therapy.

  We have not seen her for two months, although we have talked over the phone.

  Mrs. Blocker is not standing in the kitchen. She is lying, moaning, without her teeth, on her bed, her head on a single pillow. She raises her head to talk to us. We place a second pillow under her head. “That stupid couldn’t do it,” she says, pointing. We look up into the eyes of Wilma, a plump black woman in her forties who chews gum steadily. She replaced Dorothy eight months ago.

  “I tried, Mrs. Blocker—”

  “Go away!” Mrs. Blocker shouts fiercely, waving Wilma away. “You can’t do nothing.”

  Wilma leaves the room. “She can’t cook, she can’t clean. She’s a sick woman herself. I can’t stand it anymore. You remember Dorothy: she was so clean you could, excuse me, kiss her ass. I can’t take it, I’m telling you. She doesn’t tell me when to take my pills—”

  “I ast you, Mrs. Blocker,” Wilma shouts from the living room, “and you refuse to take them.”

  “I tell her to write it down so she can remember—”

  Wilma stands in the doorway. “I ast you, and you refused!”

  “What?” Mrs. Blocker looks with disgust at Wilma. “Go away.”

  “I ast you to take the pills, and you refused!”

  “I didn’t feel like it—”

  “But I can’t help it if you refuse, Mrs. Blocker—”

  “You know how much she’s earning here? Ten thousand dollars a year! Do you know what I could do with that?”

  “But you don’t earn it! I work for it.”

  “Huh?”

  “I work for my money.”

  “You do? What do you do for me? You can’t even give me my pills—”

  “You won’t take them—”

  “She won’t take me across the street in my wheelchair.”

  “I can’t lift the wheelchair up the curb, Mr. Bruce. Dorothy was a strong woman. I’m not that strong.”

  “I know you’re not strong,” Mrs. Blocker raises her head again. “Double fare she gets. Crook! Fourteen dollars a week!”

  Wilma stands in the hallway, sits on a chair, hovers over Mrs. Blocker. Whatever she does or says is wrong to Mrs. Blocker. Finally she retreats into the kitchen. She has the air of the unwanted. Her untucked shirt hangs over her slacks.

  We move Mrs. Blocker into the kitchen. She sits in a corner. Wilma moves into the living room.

  “You know what she eats for lunch? Two slices of bread, with a slice of cheese in the middle!”

  “That’s all I can afford,” Wilma shouts, now from the bedroom.

  “She don’t eat nothing. She’s a sick woman! She didn’t tell me. She has a swollen hand! She hides it behind her back. And she can’t do nothing. She lied—she told me she had been a nurse before. You know what she did? She served the trays of food and took the trays away! A liar—I could have her locked up.”

  Wilma comes into the kitchen smiling and snapping her chewing gum. She makes coffee for us.

  “Mrs. Blocker is not herself today. I know that. I understand. I know you can’t help treating me this way. But I’ve got broad shoulders. I can take it. Why don’t you like me? I like you. I really do. But you want too much sympathy, Mrs. Blocker. I can’t give it. I’m not that kind of person.”

  “Stupid, stupid.” Mrs. Blocker waves her away.

  Mrs. Blocker talks for the next two hours about Wilma and nothing else.

  “I buy a chocolate layer cake. Don’t worry, I leave Wilma alone in the kitchen and in ten minutes four pieces are gone.”

  “You offered it to me. You offered it to me.”

  “People are supposed to ask.”

  Wilma works for Mrs. Blocker from eight in the morning until eight at night, seven days a week.

  “I beg her, Wilma, do me a favor: come a little earlier. Come at seven o’clock so I can take my pills—”

  “I have to feed my daughter breakfast!”

  “Eleven years old her daughter is. She can feed herself.”

  “But she would never see her daughter then,” Susan says.

  “What?”

  “She would never see her daughter at all!” we shout.

  “I know. She’s supporting also her older daughter who has a baby. A woman all by herself. But I need a girl who can cook for me.”

  “I don’t do that!”

  “She don’t know how to make even cereal.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “What do you serve your daughter?” Mrs. Blocker says.

  “Other things. I don’t know about cereal. But I can learn, Mrs. Blocker.”

  Mrs. Blocker winces and whispers to us that she would never let Wilma’s hands touch her food.

  Wilma again walks out of the room.

  “You know how much money she’s making? Ten thousand dollars—”

  A bloodcurdling laugh from the bedroom, deep and masculine. It is Wilma. We have never heard it before.

  Mrs. Blocker shrugs. “Dot’s what it is. All day long now: heh heh heh!”

  The rattlesnake laugh reaches us again.

  “I have to get rid of her. You’re my friends. Help me. I know all about her. She was married, she had a good, educated husband—”

  “If he was so good, why did I divorce him?” Wilma screams, and runs into the kitchen.

  “He wasn’t a dummy, but an educated.”

  “I am asting you a question: why did I divorce him, if he was so fucking good? Huh? Answer me that,” and laughs and laughs, cracking her gum.

  Mrs. Blocker looks at us, shaking her head. “Laugh rather than cry.”

  She pauses for a moment, and continues: “And she gets twenty-five dollars from her husband for her daughter.”

  “Yes I do, and sometimes even more than that, Mrs. Blocker; so what?”

  “What do you do with it, tell me?”

  “What do I do with the money? I pay my mortgage, and I buy food, and clothes—”

  “She don’t eat—”

  “That’s my business. I’m fat and I’m getting fatter—look!” Wilma lifts her shirt to show us her stomach, and hits it. We hear the thud.

  Wilma reheats the coffee and stands at the sink.

  “Who are you?” Mrs. Blocker suddenly says.

  “Who am I? I don’t know. I am a black girl, madam. I am a black, forty-four-year-old woman, love, that’s who I am.”

  “You won’t live to see me die,” Mrs. Blocker shouts.

  “I don’t wish that on you. I don’t wish that on you, Mrs. Blocker. I hope I live as long as you do.”

  “Hitler!”

  Wilma’s laugh
shoots through us.

  “She laughs,” Mrs. Blocker says.

  “What do you expect her to do?” Susan asks. “You call her Hitler.”

  “You are very crazy, Mrs. Blocker,” Wilma says. “The truth is you are prejudiced. The truth is you will never be happy as long as a black girl is here, Mrs. Blocker. What you really want is a nice white Jewish girl, but you can’t get one. Nobody wants to work for you because you are a very crazy lady. So you’re stuck with me. And I know you can’t help the way you’re acting. You’ll be better later. I have got broad shoulders, Mrs. Blocker. I can take it.”

  Wilma is now laughing and snapping her fingers hard and doing a little dance by the stove. She goes to the bathroom.

  “She’s a sick woman,” Mrs. Blocker screams. “She has a swollen hand! She hides it behind her back! I ask her, where is your other hand?”

  A door slams. Wilma comes running in, her palms outstretched, showing us her hands and laughing and laughing and winking at us. “My hands are not swollen! You are crazy, Mrs. Blocker.”

  “Liar! And both your legs are swollen!”

  Wilma jumps, spreads her legs, lifts up her pants to show us her legs. “There’s nothing wrong with my legs, as you can see!”

  Mrs. Blocker looks. “No shoes! Is that a decent way to dress?”

  “THEY ARE SLIPPERS.”

  Wilma hits herself on the behind, snaps her fingers and wrists, claps her hands and laughs hysterically. She is now dancing around Mrs. Blocker and jumping up and down. We don’t know what to do.

  She is shaking her hips at Mrs. Blocker. She is beckoning to her with her arms, demanding: “Come on, Mrs. Blocker, dance with me! Get up and dance with me!” She is thrusting her arms at Mrs. Blocker; cooing: “Aww, come on, Mrs. Blocker, you can do it. I know you can.” Mrs. Blocker is holding onto her canes and shrinking back into her chair.

  “Leave me alone!”

  Wilma is saying sweetly, “I just want you to dance! Nothing to be afraid of! I’m here to help you!”

  “You are Hitler!” Mrs. Blocker screams.

  Wilma laughs and looks to us.

  “My son is dead and I don’t want to live,” Mrs. Blocker cries.

  “You want to jump out the window?”

  “Yes!”

  “Jump! I won’t stop you, madam.”

  Wilma storms out of the room.

  Tears in her eyes, Mrs. Blocker whispers: “You are my only friends. I beg you. Help me. That is all I can say.”

  We shake hands with Wilma, kiss Mrs. Blocker, and walk out, drained and shaken, onto East Broadway.

  We spend the weekend writing a report to the agency explaining the situation. We say that Wilma and Mrs. Blocker are victims victimizing each other, that the relationship has become unbearable, and ask that Wilma be given another job. They call us later in the week and tell us that they have visited Mrs. Blocker and Wilma. They found nothing wrong. They have asked Mrs. Blocker point-blank about Wilma. “Let it be,” she said. We insist on what we have seen. The director of the agency suggests that perhaps Mrs. Blocker wants it this way.

  We call her. She talks about her illnesses and her complaints.

  “But what about Wilma?”

  “Let it be.”

  We do not see Mrs. Blocker very often anymore. She pretends she does not remember us when we phone her.

  “Do you people live in the city?” she asks.

  “Mrs. Blocker—it’s us!”

  “I’m sorry, dollings; maybe if you were to come up on Sunday to see me I might recognize you.”

  XXVII

  Sometimes I visit my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. I take the elevated subway, and walk down the stairs to the street. The little wooden cubicle that was a newsstand is gone. When I was a boy I worked there for free, just to be part of it. All the stores at the corner are still there: the candy store, the shoe repair shop, the beauty salon, the tailor. The language that is spoken around me is new, is Spanish. There is surprisingly little, though, that is new in the neighborhood. The ice cream parlor is gone. But the streets are not gutted or dirty. There is no danger, but unfamiliarity. And I know very well how my mother must feel about those Spanish voices and faces—she who could not even muster up love for her own, who imagined enemies everywhere, who saw contempt in a smile and slapped me sharply across the face when I was happy, asking “What are you grinning at?”

  I approach the apartment house where she lives, where I lived for so long. It is, as I remembered, a rather nice house. There are two small stoops, one on either side of the entrance. One was the apartment where my grandparents lived and where I was taken care of. I look at the stairs leading to the stoop where I played, and I look at the door.

  The entrance to the house has rock gardens on both sides, and on the right side, a small pond where goldfish used to swim.

  I walk around the neighborhood. Amid the concrete, there is, as there always was, across the street a huge old house with land around it: Dr. Lynch’s, where my father carried me in his arms for a tonsil operation.

  Each street that I approach has an aroma, a feeling to it, the same one it had when I walked it every day to school. Some streets are darker; others are defined by their houses. The green house with the large enclosed porch is still filled with pieces of wood that still look, as they did when I was a boy, as if they were about to be cleared away. There are brown houses with windowpanes lined in green. I cannot find the old house with the well in the garden.

  As I walk down the street to P.S. 17 where I walked every day with my schoolbooks, I remember, even before they come into view, the brick apartment house with the brick courtyard across the street from the school, the brick the same autumnal color of brown and gold.

  The schoolyard is gone. Most of it is occupied by two barracks-like greenish, round buildings: an annex of some kind. I hear a ball bounce—I look inside the gate. Between the buildings a small area has been left and boys are bouncing a basketball into the one remaining hoop.

  I walk back to my mother’s house through different streets, and again each one seems to evoke the same feelings it once did. Tense, I go through the backyard into the basement, afraid I may run into her. I take the elevator to the roof, walk up the stairs and open the door, and feel the familiar soft tar surface and see the clotheslines and the steepled, open, doorless little house with triangular windows, the wind blowing through it. I look down at the street, at the trees, at the people. Hiding behind a ledge, I look down at the windows of my mother’s apartment. I do not see her shadow.

  I liked the neighborhood as a boy, and I like it now, even though there is more concrete. It really wasn’t a bad place to grow up in, if there had been other things.

  I walk back down the stairs, take the elevator to the basement, and walk to the subway.

  There is nothing else I want to see.

  10

  THE PRINCESS

  I

  At lunch the other day, my father was musing about why he never really entered the rat race. He recalled another salesman in his insurance office: a fellow who wore a red beret. This fellow, my father said, would choose the Chrysler Building or one of the other tallest buildings in Manhattan and take the elevator to the roof. Then he would walk down the staircase, enter every office on the way down and try to sell insurance. My father remembers this fellow saying to him, “You’ve never really been an insurance salesman until you’ve gone to the top of one of those buildings, the very top, and walked down, floor by floor.”

  II

  My father and I met for lunch twice a week in the Governor Cafeteria after I returned from five years in Vancouver in 1973. We talked about his childhood, about my mother, about his male and female friends on the singles scene. We didn’t talk much about my life, since it was not going well and my father would stay up nights worrying. After publishing a book, I had decided to enroll in a writing workshop in the West Village to get moving again in New York. I joined the workshop at a happy moment—the instr
uctor was both celebrating his birthday and getting his BA from the New School, and the students were baking him a cake. I came in with ten pages of my story—about winning the friendship of Frank Sinatra (opposites attract, etc.) and was told to put it away for now, roll up my sleeves, and join my colleagues in the kitchen.

  My father talked about a fellow in his office, Rupert Pike, a shriveled man with a freckled skinny face, glasses, and a jutting Adam’s apple. Suddenly smiling, he said, “When I went to the office this morning, Rupert was sleeping on the floor. He doesn’t have money for a place to stay since he broke up with his wife. His wife would get drunk and beat him up every night. He used to have bandages on his head, Bruce. She’s an alcoholic. He told me that when she threw him out of the house he would go back early in the morning and knock on the door. ‘Evvie, darling? Evvie,’ he would say. She would scream at him, ‘Get the hell out of here, you son of a bitch.’ This went on for years, and he still was crazy about her.”

  My father laughed. “Explain this to me, Bruce, if you can. This fellow—Rupert—is the most happy-go-lucky fellow in the world. He tells me these things, and he laughs and laughs. He has no money at all. He asks me for a dollar for food, and I found out what he does. He goes downstairs and has a martini! And do you know why he has no money? He has a new girl friend, and he bought her a piano. She lives in a rooming house. Today he said, ‘She has an income: one hundred dollars.’ ‘A week?’ I said. ‘A month,’ he said. ‘She’s on welfare. I feel so sorry for her … I’d like to marry her.’

  “Then he said she goes haywire every once in a while. She has a bad face … broken down … and he’d like to fix it for her. She has black teeth. He said he wants so badly to cap her teeth for her.

  “Then Rupert tapped me on the arm and said with a wink: ‘She allowed me a kiss on the cheek last night …’ I’m a bad boy, Bruce, I shouldn’t say anything, but I asked him how he could kiss a girl with black teeth. He just smiled at me. He mails her a love letter and a dollar every day. He told me what his secret ambition was: to play piano in a whorehouse!