Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “Look, get modern, will you?” Anna had said to her. “Get with the twentieth century. You’re still living back in the horse-and-buggy age.”

  “At least people were decent then,” Gert had insisted. “Not like this sewer we live in now. Don’t invite me to any more lectures. I’m better off at home.”

  The fumes from the Armenians patio were filling Anna’s apartment, choking her. “Who needs the Gestapo when you have this?” She dragged her kitchen chair into the walk-in pantry closet and closed the door, sitting there in the dark with the matzo meal boxes and the cans of soup. The stink of the charcoal lighter filled every crevice. “What should I do?” she said aloud into the darkness. “Run away three times a day to walk up and down Santa Monica Boulevard till they finish their steaks? Get myself mugged while they eat like horses on my tax money? They should only choke.” She hoped the charred meat would work fast on them.

  What had happened to America, anyway? After seventy-five years of running away from the East Side of New York with all those barbarians, here she was again with these. No progress. All that culture she thought was out there in the world, that she had tried to absorb, came to nothing—to this. What did the world care that Anna Goldman lived in two rooms, and in each room she had a piano!

  There was a thud against the wall of the closet. She felt she had been hit in the kidneys.

  “Wally, I swear—I’ll bite off your little finger if you ever do that again!”

  Another thud. The gay young men next door. She knew their pattern. A loud yelling fight, full of accusations. Dishes breaking. Furniture sliding around. Then the lengthy reconciliation, with those noises! Worse than cats in heat. Wasn’t it embarrassing for them to meet her at the trash bin after they had carried on like that? Howls, gasps, shrieks, moans! “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” one of them always screamed a hundred times. They should only do it in a church where God could hear them, Anna thought, and give me some peace. But when she met one or the other of them at the garbage bin, so well-groomed in his pink silk shirt, or his net underwear, he’d always graciously lift the lid for her, toss her garbage into the back, where she couldn’t reach, wish her a good day. At least those boys had manners. They were raised in good American families. But she wouldn’t go so far as to let them pull her grocery cart up the steps to her apartment. The last thing she needed was AIDS. She had read in the LA Times about the bathhouses in San Francisco, the catwalks where men would stand so others could do a specialized activity on them. Well, that was their business. She was modern, live and let live. Not like Gert, out of the dark ages. But did she have to listen to it all day? She had stopped eating out altogether except for the Center because so many of those gay boys worked in the restaurants. They had a knack for cooking. But did she want them laying lettuce on her tuna sandwiches? Not after where those hands had been!

  She opened the closet door; the fumes enclosed her and she could almost feel the flames on her skin, crisping it like bacon.

  “Bastards,” she whispered. In her old age she should come to this, locked in a closet, instead of revered, respected, with her children gathered round. “They have their own lives to live,” she corrected herself. They were loving and loyal, her daughters called her every day. She didn’t want to live near them, the way Gert urged her to do—live in the suburbs with a church on every corner and listen to the leaf-blowers blast out her eardrums. The expert on high blood pressure at the Center had lectured on how noise raises the blood pressure of rats within two hours. He should only be here today listening to the racket from the Russian’s apartment—he would have a stroke in five minutes.

  “Enough of the dark,” she said. She stepped out of the closet and heard her doorbell shrilling.

  “Who is it?” she yelled, standing ten feet back from the door.

  “It’s only your landlady, darling, it’s not a mugger. Open the door, Mrs. Goldman—we have something to talk about here.”

  Bitch face Anna thought. I am not in the mood for this now. She unlocked her three locks and drew the chain back. “I was just going out, Mrs. Blungman. I give a concert today. Can you make it fast?”

  “At our age you shouldn’t be in such a hurry,” she said, “or it could kill you one-two-three.” Mrs. Blungman was short and fat, like a matzo ball. Her face was a lump of dough, with a nose plopped on, two eyes gouged out, and cold blue marbles pressed in the holes. Her hair was thin, like white cotton thread pasted on a child’s pink rubber ball.

  “I have a complaint against you.”

  “Who made it?” Anna demanded.

  “My sources are confidential. By the way, could it be it was you picked a lemon from my lemon tree?”

  “Of course not! Why would I take one of your precious lemons?”

  “Lemons are very expensive now in the stores.”

  “For your information, Mrs. Blungman, I could afford to pay a dollar for a lemon if I had to.”

  “So it wasn’t you?”

  “So I said.”

  “So, now to the complaint.”

  “That wasn’t the complaint?”

  “The complaint is coming, don’t worry, it’s right here on my tongue.”

  “Make it fast please. I’m on my way out.”

  “Alone? You of all people should know how dangerous these streets are. Where’s your head after being held up at gunpoint in your store! You take big risks, Mrs. Goldman.”

  “When I’m in the tomb I won’t take risks,” Anna said.

  “You don’t sweep your patio,” said Mrs. Blungman.

  “I don’t sweep my patio? You send spies up to my patio? It’s two feet by two feet—I never go out there. No one can see it. The sun never shines there. It stinks from the Armenians’ barbecue. I pay rent for my privacy. My patio is my kingdom just like my bathroom.”

  “So—since you raised the subject yourself, I wasn’t going to discuss that today—I would like to know how come there are scratches in your toilet bowl? You clean it with Brillo? We don’t allow that.”

  Anna felt her blood bubble up through her veins.

  “You go snooping in my toilet? That’s illegal. I could sue you.”

  “It’s legal, darling, for a landlord to have a key to every apartment, in case of fire, to paint, to fix the air conditioner.”

  “You haven’t painted in five years. The air conditioner has been broken since I moved in…”

  Mrs. Blungman cut her off. “And we could evict you, Mrs. Goldman, if you don’t keep your windows open from now on. Because for some crazy reason you keep them all locked up when you go out, and that causes termites in the building.”

  “That’s ridiculous! That’s insane! You’re the one who’s crazy! Termites if I close my windows!” Anna began to close the door. Mrs. Blungman stopped her with a heavy hand.

  “I didn’t get to the main complaint yet, darling.”

  “Your time is up. I have to go somewhere.”

  “They don’t like your piano playing in the next building.”

  “Who says so?”

  “I got sources. Not every apartment would allow two pianos for one tenant. You have twenty fingers?”

  “I told you—one is from the antique store. When I had to give it up, I took the piano from the store here. But I only play one piano at a time. And with the soft pedal, always.”

  “The people in the next building don’t like what you play.”

  “What? You want me to submit a program to them for approval?”

  “You play too gloomy. If they have to listen they would like a few show tunes, a patriotic march, something from Barbra Streisand. Not what you give them.”

  “Mozart you can’t give them,” Anna said. “Of this I am aware.”

  “You live on a high horse, Mrs. Goldman. Relax a little, enjoy.”

  “As long as I sweep my patio and clean my toilet.”

  “You got it, darling.”

  Anna walked toward the Senior Citizens’ Center. The streets swarmed wit
h foreigners. She could be anywhere—Korea, Israel, Mexico, China. English was no longer the main language of this country. Even on Fairfax Avenue, Yiddish was getting buried. She would go into a bakery, and the women working there were wearing babushkas and jabbering in Russian. She would go to the doctor’s office, and the technicians told jokes in Spanish. On top of this, the respectful separation of the sexes was gone—to have a cardiogram she had to submit to a black man snapping his fingers as he plopped rubber suction cups around the edges of her breasts. Her poor misled father, with his dreams of coming to America where the streets were paved with gold. Where anyone could become president (but not a Jew, he realized before he died young). He worked so hard, sewing all day in the factories, bringing home piecework at night. But here the foreigners came with jewelry hidden in their underwear, took their doles from the government, and broiled steaks on their barbecues while Anna choked. The foreigners thought life was a big joke—they were always laughing on the streets. Israeli men wearing gold chains in layers around their hairy necks pushed their dark-eyed, round-nosed babies up and down the streets in fancy strollers. In the city college where Anna took classes, the students with their slanty eyes or their gold-toned skin or their peasant faces all seemed slack, tired, indifferent. Their grades were barely C’s. None of them were like the immigrants she was descended from. They had worked like demons, learning the language, learning the ways of the new world. These people came and had it handed to them. They came to America poor, but they wouldn’t work hard. They wouldn’t learn English.

  A few years ago when Anna had had her surgery, the Filipino nurses in the hospital had joked in their jabbering tongue, right over her head as if she were nothing more than a tree trunk in the bed, completely ignored her as they wired her into the transfusion machinery; they gossiped nonstop, joked—didn’t have the proper respect for their work, for life and death, and for patients who were fighting for one over the other. They thought it was just a big party over here, that’s all.

  Anna didn’t care, as Gert did, about morals, wasn’t horrified by the prostitutes strutting up and down Hollywood Boulevard, or by the gay men screaming oh my God at their heights of passion. Sex was one thing. She could live with it if she had to, as long as no one was seducing her. But laziness, pure greed and laziness, that was something else.

  “Where you been keeping yourself all my life, Sweet Lips?”

  “I have no patience for you today, Bernie,” Anna said, taking her tray, and moving along the lunch line. She only came to the Center because if she ate a real meal at lunchtime (and who could deny that seventy-five cents was a good price?) she wouldn’t have to worry about cooking anything for her dinner. She weighed just under a hundred pounds—a fact which was both a source of pride and worry. If she should catch the flu, and not be able to eat for a week, she had no margin to depend on, she would turn into a skeleton. But compared to the matzo-ball ladies all over the place, she had the edge—a certain grace, a swing of her skirt. Bernie wasn’t the only one after her. She could see herself in the mirror behind the cafeteria workers—her white hair perfectly short, clipped in a clean, even line. Not a single curl, a pompadour, a frizz; not a bleached mop, not a wig, not a movie-star’s head of hair on the face of a crone. Integrity was what she stood for. She was a lost soul, one of a kind, and no one cared about what she stood for.

  “White meat of the chicken, please,” Anna said.

  “Take what’s on the plate or leave it, darling,” the woman said. “You don’t get special privileges.”

  “Listen, you know me,” Anna said. “I volunteer my time at this Center just like you, I play a concert here every week. Today in fact.”

  The woman shoved the plate at her. Diamonds sparkled on her fingers. “A leg and a wing, darling—that’s what’s on this plate. Take it or leave it.”

  Bitch face Anna thought. Give them a little authority and they become like prison wardens. Mrs. Blungmans were everywhere. Sadistic. Vicious. The human race was too far gone. This woman was one of the worst, with her airs and her Zsa-Zsa accent.

  Bernie sat next to her. His hands shook as he spread his napkin across his stained gray pants-legs. “My offer is still good, Angel Face,” he said, beginning to lift a forkful of peas to his mouth. By the time he got the fork halfway up, most of the peas had spilled off. Anna brushed a pea angrily from her skirt.

  “We’ll take a cruise to Europe, just you and me, first-class, we’ll dance the night away, Emerald Eyes.”

  She’d been through this before. She’d had a vision of herself in the middle of the ocean, with his corpse on the bed and the band playing “God Bless America” in the grand ballroom. (“A millionaire wants to marry me,” Anna had told her daughters. “He has no children—you girls could be rich.” “Don’t sell your soul for us,” the girls had advised her. “Don’t worry,” Anna had replied. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”)

  The creamed corn was like glue. The chicken leg had a bone showing through, jagged, with black blood clotted in its marrow. Anna reached for her milk carton; her thumbs pressed the edges back and pain shot into both her elbows. She clamped her teeth and waited for it to pass. She didn’t need reminders from her nerve endings of what was going on inside her.

  “You’re doing the wrong end,” Bernie said, grease on his chin. “Here, I’ll do it for you, Sweet Lips.”

  She pushed the carton toward him. Bernie couldn’t open the milk container either. He was struggling intently, his tongue showing, breathing loudly, pulling at the cardboard with his gnarled fingers. Anna felt her mouth turn down, and tears, like burning acid rising too high from her empty stomach, seared her eyes.

  She stood up. Her lunch lay congealing on the paper plate. She touched Bernie on the shoulder, gently.

  He didn’t turn his head to look up at her; he had arthritis of the neck bones. “I’ll be down at the rec room at your concert, Gorgeous,” he said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes, front row, center. You’ll know me by the red rose in my lapel.”

  In the bathroom Anna combed her hair and saw in the mirror her father’s dream—the girl with long sugar-water curls, the girl raised up in the land of opportunity who could play so beautifully the piano he had worked for years to buy her. He wouldn’t know her now if he saw her. The skin of her face was an accordion of the days of her life, folded one upon the other. This was what was left of her. What counted was inside, invisible.

  Carrying her music, swinging her skirt, she went down the long empty hall to the rec room. The piano keys had only half their ivories. The keyboard welcomed her with its toothless grin.

  She knew what they liked, her ten or twelve regulars and the four or five other poor souls who wandered into the rec room, passing time till the free blood pressure test or the cholesterol lecture. They liked “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Entertainer,” “Roll Out the Barrel.” She knew: Mozart you can’t give them—but this was her show. It might do them some good. She opened her music book and warmed up her fingers.

  THE BLOOD PRESSURE BUNCH AND THE ALZHEIMER’S GANG

  At the Multi-Purpose Center there was a bigger crowd for Anna’s concert than usual; free blood pressure readings started in an hour—this allowed time for the sediment of the subsidized lunch to settle. The old folks were shuffling their way into the rec room like a herd of cows. Lowing and mooing, scrambling for seats, they were giving their own concert, a regular barnyard symphony—what did they need Anna for?

  She ran a few scales up and down the keys of the old spinet; it was badly out of tune, but what did they know—these peasants and barbarians who came to hear her. When the scraping of canes and the whirring of wheel chairs had quieted, she played a few bars of the theme from Dragnet to get everyone’s attention. Then she swung around on the bench.

  “Ladies and gentlemen”—she was as cordial as their round vacant cow-eyes would permit—“today I will be playing a program of Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin.”

  A crackling noise in the first
row directed Anna’s attention to an old man in a wheel chair who was burrowing intently in a brown paper bag in his lap. “Excuse me,” Anna said. He extracted a bagel which he held up to the light, examining it for defects. “Sir, the lunch hour is over. I ask that no eating take place during the concert.”

  He appeared not to hear her.

  “I just loathe Beethoven,” said a loud voice from somewhere in the back. This took Anna’s breath away. She searched unbelievingly for a face in this room which knew enough to speak the word loathe.

  “Who said that?” she demanded. “Who?”

  “Me.” A frizzy blonde, wearing green pants and a pink blouse, stood up. “Beethoven you could die of from boredom. Can’t you do a nice tune from Chorus Line?”

  “I don’t know Chorus Line,” Anna said. “Sit down please.”

  The woman stared at her. “You don’t know Chorus Line? It’s only been the biggest hit on Broadway for the last fifty years!”

  “I don’t specialize in Broadway,” Anna said. “Would you please sit down so we can get started?”

  “Yeah, sit down!” Bernie yelled. Anna’s buddy: he winked at her four times. Or maybe it was the tic from his neuralgia. “Sit down or you get bounced out of here.”

  Anna waited. She made it clear she would stand there till they behaved. What could she expect in the way of decorum, manners, taste? They were from the jungle. Even when Anna went to the Music Center to hear the greats, the audience applauded at the wrong time—at the end of a movement, sometimes even at a rest in the music. Right in front of her at this very moment, the old man in the wheelchair—could a person believe this?—was smearing his bagel with cream cheese from a little paper cup balanced on his knee.

  “You,” Anna said. “The gentleman right here. You! There is no eating allowed in this room.”

  “Oh—give him a break,” the blonde in the pink blouse yelled. “He came too late for lunch, they wouldn’t let him in. So let him have his little snack.”