Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  The man was chewing quite happily. He smiled at Anna, gratefully, sweetly, his eyes bright. Like a little monkey, he looked at her from under his bushy eyebrows. All right, he was from the Alzheimer’s Gang, he didn’t know any better. Anna swung back around on her seat and brushed her hands delicately over her skirt. She positioned her hands and began to play the first notes of the “Moonlight Sonata.” Immediately a scuffling started up behind her; she threw a fast look over her shoulder.

  “What is this?” she cried, stopping at once.

  “Play, honey, play,” said a woman of no less than ninety years. She was spinning around on the floor. “You make my heart happy. When do I ever get a chance to dance like this?” She waltzed in a circle by herself, holding a bulging shopping bag against her chest.

  Anna looked around to see if there was someone, anyone, who could understand her exasperation with a lunatic like this. But all of them had the same blank innocent eyes—cows chewing their cud. There was no way to get respectful attention here. No way at all.

  “Please, please!” Anna said. “Sit down. If you want to dance, join the dance class.”

  “I’m all done, darling,” the old woman said. “My breath is gone. My pacemaker only lets me celebrate a few seconds at a time. So don’t worry, I’m all done. Relax. Sit down now and play some more, send us to seventh heaven.”

  Anna Goldman and Arthur Rubinstein were the only two people in the world who knew what a battle it was to get the attention of the mindless masses.

  “The piano has a little look of a coffin,” Rubinstein said a few years ago on the MacNeil-Lehrer Report. At home Anna had a typed copy (she sent away two dollars to the television station) of what Rubinstein had said in the interview. She kept it on her coffee table and read it every day for support. Arthur would certainly sympathize with her right now if he were here. He knew how hard it was, he said it himself: how people came to listen to him play after a good dinner, the women thinking only about dresses, the men about business or sports. “There I have this crowd, not really knowers of music…and that is a very difficult proposition. I have to hold them…by my emotion…there is a moment where I please them all…I can hold them with one little note in the air, and they will not breathe….That is a great, great moment. Not always does it happen, but when it does happen, it is a great moment of our lives.”

  Well, it didn’t ever happen at the Multi-Purpose Center. Anna wished Arthur Rubinstein were her husband. She would leave here and go home, and there he’d be on her little worn-out couch, waiting for her, sipping tea, listening to music in his head. She would tell him about the crazies at her concert, and he’d commiserate, nod his head, say, “Well, you’re doing them good, music is good for their souls.” He would think they had souls. She didn’t.

  She really could have married him. He was born in 1887, only twenty years before she was. She could have met him, they would have had brilliant children, great musicians. Not that she hadn’t loved her Abram, not that she didn’t love her girls, but her musical gene had been diluted to nothing in her children by Abram, a sweet man but not an artist, a man who couldn’t play a note. The girls didn’t turn out to have one drop of musical talent. When they were little she would threaten them: “I’m going to swallow iodine if you don’t sit down and practice.” She and Arthur Rubinstein had the same passionate nature—they were both from Polish stock. Like Anna with her iodine, he had tried to kill himself when he was twenty because he had no money and he was in love with a married woman who wouldn’t get a divorce. Hanging himself didn’t work—the things he used broke—so he sat down and played the piano instead. Anna understood this exactly; that’s what she always did. When it became clear to her (which it did every day) that life was all a big nothing, she sat down and played the piano. So here she was: playing for the Blood Pressure Bunch and the Alzheimer’s Gang.

  She surrendered herself to the notes of the “Moonlight Sonata” and pretended Rubinstein was watching her from the poster on the wall that said “High Blood Pressure Is the Silent Killer”—he was listening to her, his beautiful long head cocked slightly to the side. She closed her eyes, feeling the pedals rise and fall under her feet. She had a sense of herself as a ballerina, lightly moving over a green meadow. Rubinstein was admiring the way her delicate shoulders swayed, the way her girlish waist bent, the airy movement of the hem of her skirt. Her face, her ancient, fallen face, was bowed over the keys, hidden from view. Even her hands, whose skin was as crinkled and brown as the bag which held the old man’s bagel, moved like graceful white birds. All that she was was in the music.

  “Bravo, Passion Flower!”

  Oh, shut up, Bernie!

  “Come to my tent tonight!” he called.

  Men and their circulating hormones. They never gave up. Even Rubinstein was probably dreaming of it when he was ninety-five. Abram had looked forward to it, every night if she would let him, not really believing that the next day she always had a migraine. Even when she had a migraine, and told him so, he’d say, “I’ll make it better. I’ll kiss it away.” Beethoven probably had it on his mind all the time, too. Otherwise, how could he write music like this? The calm after the struggle, the peace in the moonlight.

  When it was over, when she had grudgingly played “Sunrise, Sunset” as her encore, she began to gather up her music.

  “That was very good, I want you to know you have talent,” the blonde in the green pants said to Anna. “Would you be interested in a blind date? You look like you could use a little social life.”

  “I look somehow lacking to you?” Anna asked. The woman had wrists and ankles like an ox, a peasant face.

  “You look good for your age, you kept your weight down,” the woman said.

  “Thank you.”

  “The man I have in mind for you is my neighbor. He’s in the hospital now with his prostate. But a wonderful musician. When he gets out is what I’m thinking—he used to play the tuba in the Cleveland Symphony before his emphysema.”

  “He’ll need a nurse when he gets out,” Anna said.

  “So—what’s the harm if you make a little chicken soup till he’s on his feet? This is a wonderful man I’m talking about, a prize.”

  “If he’s so wonderful, why don’t you have a social life with him?”

  “I’m dating a butcher, thank you,” she said. “Kosher. The finest cuts of meat.”

  “Meat at our age is very bad,” Anna said. “Don’t you listen at the lectures? And will you please excuse me now?” Anna said. “I’m very tired.”

  “He would appreciate your thin hips. His wife, she should rest in peace, was a hippopotamus down there.” “Excuse me,” Anna said. “I’m not feeling well.”

  “It’s the food they serve us here. Surplus from World War Two, I think.”

  Bernie was now closing in on her; she had the impression that he was flapping his lips like a goldfish.

  “Look!” Anna pointed to the door. “They’re lining up for blood pressure! You two don’t want to miss it. High blood pressure is the silent killer.”

  Anna sat at her kitchen table and ate a chocolate chip cookie. No Arthur Rubinstein was on her couch. It was getting dark and the gay boys next door were playing “The Tennessee Waltz.” Her daughters were probably cooking dinner in their houses, something warm and nourishing, possibly even stuffed cabbage, which it seemed to her she had last made in another life. Her girls—an hour away in the suburbs—always said, “We wish you lived nearby, then you could have dinner with us.” They didn’t know what they were saying. If she lived nearby, there would be no end of complications. For example, Janet’s husband, the professor, had a habit of chewing his applesauce. This annoyed Anna and she would probably have to say something eventually. Her other son-in-law had had much worse habits—and to him she had said plenty—but he was dead. She sometimes thought she should move in with Carol and help her raise the boys.

  Neither of the boys could spell the simplest words; they had never even hea
rd of Beethoven—all they cared about was some ugly gorilla called Hulk Hogan. Also, they devoured food like King Kong. They lived—like some new mutation of penguins—in the refrigerator. Whenever Anna looked at them, two healthy boys, they always had an arm stuck in the freezer, pulling out frozen pizzas, frozen burritos, frozen donuts, and always—the other hand wrapped around a can of soda, as if milk didn’t exist. They had things in and out of the microwave so fast, it was like watching a speeded-up film. Anna was appalled to see that much food disappear down their gullets. No one needed to eat that much, that constantly. She was sure most of it passed out of their systems undigested. And their mother let them get away with it. It was true Carol had other things on her mind; she had to devote a great deal of time going to singles’ events and then getting depressed from the losers she met, but still…

  There was no point trying to run her children’s lives. From a distance, it was all right to see their flaws and get annoyed; if she lived with them, she would probably have a stroke every day from their stupidity. Maybe what she needed to take her mind off her troubles was a social life. But did she want a blind date with an invalid tuba player who had been married to a hippopotamus?

  If only Rubinstein were eligible! If only money grew on trees and everyone were a genius! If Anna decided to go looking among the hordes, she would have to be very choosy. She’d seen an interesting ad in the personal column in the paper for the last three weeks. She had it right here on the table:

  “Scrabble Expert welcomes challenge from Smart Cookie. Former Navy officer with medals, now senior citizen; owns seventeen dictionaries. Non-smoking gentleman. Wordsmith. Elocution afficionado. Will come to you. Or vice-versa. Call 653-1050.”

  At least here was a man who knew a word or two. These days, even that was a miracle.

  “I’m rapturous that you called, you sound very intelligent,” the man said on the phone. “You want to elucidate and maybe give your name?”

  “Not yet. I don’t reveal my name to strangers so fast,” Anna said.

  “You want your nomenclature to be ‘Hey you’?”

  “Slow down,” Anna said. “You live alone?”

  “A widower for ten years, tired of solitary hibernation. I have impressive references if you want; I’m clean living, no drinking, no gambling. My late wife was an angel; I respect women, believe me, so I’m not looking for funny-business.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Companionship, a good game of Scrabble, maybe a steak dinner out now and then.”

  “Steak is a death sentence at our age,” Anna said. “You’re how old?”

  “A young seventy-three. And you?”

  “Around there,” Anna said. “In very good shape.”

  “You have a pencil? I’ll give you directions.”

  “How could you imagine I would come to a perfect stranger’s house? How do I know you have honorable intentions?” On the last words Anna’s voice had turned coy and flirtatious, which astonished her—that such a tone still lived within her.

  “That’s very perspicacious of you. I respect caution these days. So let me get a pencil—you’ll give me directions to your place.”

  “What about your seventeen dictionaries—you carry them with you?”

  “On the bus that would be foolish.”

  “I’m thinking suddenly this is a mistake,” Anna said. “Nice as I’m sure you are, I can’t let a perfect stranger come to my house.”

  “If I’m perfect, what’s the worry?”

  Anna was silent. She considered hanging up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “A bad choice of a joke.”

  “I’ll think about this and call you in a few days.”

  “No! Don’t hang up! Please! Let’s not lose this propitious event.”

  “You don’t have many calls on your ad?”

  “Not from a cultured, charming person with expertise like yourself, who sounds like twenty years old.”

  “All right,” Anna said. “I have an idea. We could meet at the Multi-Purpose, you know the one on Fairfax?” “Certainly I do. Tomorrow?”

  “I could arrange it. After lunch. In the lobby. One o’clock.”

  “I’ll bring Scrabble.”

  “Good,” Anna said.

  “So now, would you consider it wise to tell me your name?”

  “Anna Goldman.”

  “How do you do, Anna?”

  “And you go by…?”

  “Jack…Jack or Izzy Fine, take your pick, what suits your inclinations.”

  “Thank you,” Anna said. “Jack is fine.”

  “I’ll count the minutes, already my stopwatch is running,” he said.

  Anna laughed in spite of herself. Then she carefully lowered her voice and said goodbye sternly. Still, the instant she hung up, she laughed out loud again. For the briefest moment, everything in her kitchen looked bright, as if little lights had gone on inside her teapot, her sugar bowl, and her toaster oven.

  But when she actually saw him in the lobby, spiffy in a sport jacket, his two strands of white hair glued to his spotted brown scalp, her throat closed. She knew him by the Scrabble set in his lap. But aside from that, she knew him. By his high waist, by his thin legs, by his flabby arm muscles. She knew him the same way she knew the legions of old ladies—she knew his story: the dead wife, the kids (he’d have complaints about them or he’d rave about how good they were to him). Either he was lonely, or he had ten old ladies making propositions of marriage every day. Or not even of marriage—of anything! There were eighty-five women for every fifteen decrepit, on-their-last-legs old men in this town, and most of them were shameless!

  Anna wobbled forward on her high heels toward the row of orange chairs, one of which contained Jack Fine. She could break an ankle from this vanity. The smell of the perfume she had sprayed on her neck was choking her. Her skirt had little gold threads woven through it which caught the ceiling lights and flashed reflections up at her to give her the symptoms she’d been warned about by Dr. Rifkin: the way it would feel when her retina detached. Her blind date was sitting rigid, clutching a battered brown Scrabble box. His tie, bright red, dotted with white anchors, was knotted so high under his chin it appeared to be cutting off his air. His face was mottled with matching red circles—probably a symptom of impending stroke. She could tell he was wearing a laundry-starched shirt to impress her. A gold tie clasp gleamed. She had a vision of him taking off his shirt; in fact, he was suddenly taking off all his clothes right in front of her. They were perhaps already married—or, if she had lowered her standards, maybe going on a cruise together. But there she was, stuck with him. His spine was sunken between the white slack muscles of his curved back. And the rest—God help her! She didn’t want to imagine the rest of what she’d see if he took off his pants!

  And in between now and the fabulous cruise—the eternity of dinners with him, his false feeth digging into steak after steak! The earliest confiding conversations: which operations he had had, which she had had, which ones he needed, which ones she needed. And the ailments yet to come for both of them! They would never run out of material.

  But finally, and most terrifying, as they progressed into their future together, he would have to get it over with. “Play the piano for me, Anna,” he would ask, because, if he was any kind of gentleman, if he was decent, he’d have to recognize “her interests.” He would lean back on her couch, chivalrous, gallantly stifling his yawns while she was coerced into betraying Mozart for him!

  Not a moment too soon she stopped to scrutinize a cholesterol poster: a dead cow and a happy fish. Her beloved Arthur Rubinstein had said that people who think happiness is to enjoy a good cutlet and go to bed and win at a game are stupid. “There is nothing in it,” he had said. “That is not life. Life is bite into it, to take absolutely as it is.

  Jack Fine, a sailor’s sappy grin hanging crooked on his face, was sweeping the field with his lighthouse eyes. His beam hit her square in the face and knocked h
er off course. One second more and Anna might not have escaped. Now it was merely a matter of deserting him at dockside. All right—it wasn’t the most refined thing to do, but it wouldn’t be such a horror. He’d sit there alone for maybe ten more minutes. By then a half-dozen dames would be closing in, complimenting the anchors on his tie.

  COMES AN EARTHQUAKE

  Anna—who never once played a card game in her adult life—leaned back in one of the red metal chairs furnished for the guests of the Colby Plaza and watched her sister Ava hunched over her cards. Anna had been in Miami Beach five days already and was still at a loss to understand Ava and her friends. Furred in mink stoles and intent on their hands, they expertly slid new cards into their fans, closing and opening them like magic. What Anna couldn’t understand was how these old ladies—women who’d lived through the Depression, who’d lost sons in the war (Ava’s son went down over New Guinea and her youngest boy was peppered with shrapnel in France), women who’d lost a husband or two—could just sit on their behinds eight hours a day on a porch in Miami Beach and play poker!

  “I’m wondering…” Anna said, “how is it that no one around here ever walks to the beach, only a block away? Where I live, in Los Angeles, you could give your right arm for a breath of air like this.”

  “So why not move here?” asked one of the ladies. No one raised her head from over her cards; Anna wasn’t sure if the voice belonged to Ida (whose husband, Herman, was upstairs with Alzheimer’s) or Sadie (emphysema—she smoked four packs a day) or Ava’s best friend, Mickey (her husband had had a fatal heart attack when he tripped on two gay boys, naked on the beach at night, a year ago).

  “Why should anyone move to a morgue?”

  A man’s voice. At first Anna thought it came from Collins Avenue, from the sidewalk five feet in front of her chair where a trickle of old folks passed by in the deepening dusk. The women, dragged down by their diamonds and mink, promenaded, as if along a hospital corridor, on the arms of old men wearing jackets and bow ties. Anna glanced along the row of metal chairs till she made out what looked like a dark balloon floating against the pink stucco of the hotel wall. She tried to focus her eyes. Glaucoma was working its way through her retina; one of these days the sights of the world would go black on her. (Amazing, how this morning, Ava, needing to sew a button on her housecoat, threaded the needle in just one pass; eyes like an eagle and she was ninety to Anna’s seventy-eight.)