by Amy Gustine
Megan kept warning, “Be careful. My mom and me made it.”
Lou’s voice, like a German shepherd’s bark, pierces the patio door and Joanne immediately drops her cigarette, stepping on it as she swivels.
“What the hell are you doing? I was out there ringing the goddamn bell.”
Inside the familiar carping begins. Lay down? Aren’t you going to shower? You stink. Well, what’s wrong with him? Maybe he’s got your problem with the ears. Have you had him checked, for Christ’s sake? I’m turning off the air conditioning. The poor thing’s probably cold. You keep it like a freezer in here. Then to the baby. Is that shit I smell? Did you shit your pants?
Yes, Joanne thinks, climbing the stairs, let him take some of the heat. He brought it on himself.
Lou takes the baby outside. Moles have turned the yard into a treacherous expanse of lumps and divots. From the spare bedroom Joanne watches her mother plod, an anvil with legs, over the uneven grass. She bounces the crying baby roughly on one hip, her face turned away from his in a look of oblique disgust. By the garage she inspects the roses—in need of a trim—then marches over to the shade garden and scowls at the hosta riddled with slug holes. Coming back toward the patio, Lou steps on a mole tunnel, buckling her left knee. As the baby pitches backward, she brings the other arm around and before Joanne can even turn to run downstairs, she’s anchored him on her hip and her face, stiffened with rage, pivots to the window. Quickly, Joanne steps out of sight.
After the fastest shower of her life, she goes down and pokes her head outside. “He okay?”
“Jesus, what the hell is wrong with your yard? I nearly broke my leg.” Lou toes some limp annuals. “And these plants need water.”
“That’s Ryan’s thing.”
“Of course. God forbid you get off your ass.”
“You can go,” Joanne says, reaching for the baby.
“I’ve got him. Dry your hair, for God’s sake. Go.” Her mother pats the baby’s back and he stops crying a moment, his loose eyes focused for a second on some bug or flower.
On her bed, Joanne curls into the fetal position, though the house is fast becoming too warm. Sweat runs between her breasts. She should change into something lighter, but doesn’t move. A shout erupts, then another. Kids’ shouts. Bicycle-speed, they pass the house.
Tina usually rode her bike everywhere, but Megan didn’t have a bike and Joanne’s bike had a flat tire, so after their soap opera ended, the girls walked to the corner of Caid’s block and sat on the hill. While they waited, hoping he would come out and play basketball, they plucked tufts of grass and threw them into the street. In a while, a girl with bright red hair rode by on a yellow bike. Tina muttered something about Raggedy Ann. Joanne let it go by and circled back to the boyfriend. “You think he might move in?”
“I don’t know!”
“Tina,” Megan warned.
Tina flapped a hand at her. “Just shut up.”
The red-haired girl rode by again, staring at them. Tina threw a clump of grass at her, its soil still clinging to the roots. “What are you looking at, you ugly little shit?”
“Whoa,” Joanne said. “Don’t let your mother hear you say that.”
Lou comes back inside. The baby’s cry has taken a sudden upswing, its pitch sharper, more like a bird’s shriek. What is she doing? Joanne gets up and goes out in the hallway, leaning over the stair rail.
What’s the matter? You don’t like your swing? Your mother doesn’t make you stay in it, does she? She’s always hauling you around. There’s the snap of the safety bar locking in place. Just try it, the voice directs, low and quiet, like a secret. The broken-sounding click-grind of the mechanism starts up. Joanne returns to bed and presses a pillow against her ear.
After Tina yelled at her, the girl on the yellow bike rode down the street and went into a dingy gray house five doors down from Caid’s. There were big American cars parked half on the front lawn, their long rusty hoods and broken taillights suggesting shipwreck. She came back out with five older kids, three boys in dirty T-shirts and two girls in black tank tops. As they neared, Joanne could see a flamingo tattooed on one of the girl’s arms. It had the name “Rick” in blue-black along its neck.
“You been throwing dirt at my sister?” the girl asked.
Tina tried to wiggle out of the accusation, but the older kids weren’t fooled. One of the boys smirked. “Maybe we oughta teach these bitches a lesson.”
The other girl said something Joanne couldn’t catch and nodded toward Megan.
Tina said, “Megan could whip her ass.”
Megan looked both doubtful and thrilled. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll fight her.”
As Megan stepped into the street, Joanne noticed the same stain on the seat of her shorts from yesterday and the day before. She put it together then—Tina’s letting Megan tag along, the tall grass, the girls’ unreasonable hunger, Megan’s unwashed hair. The boyfriend wasn’t moving in. Their mother had moved out.
•
Joanne takes four Tylenol knowing they won’t help, then strips down to her underwear. Crawling back in bed, she freezes at the sound of Lou’s voice.
“Joanne!”
“What?”
“Where’s his cups? These cupboards are a mess.”
“Upper, right of the sink.”
A few seconds pass. The baby continues to cry. Joanne puts the pillow back over her ear.
“Joanne!”
“What?”
“Get down here!”
In the kitchen Lou stands in front of the open fridge, the baby propped on her hip, howling, his back arched against her iron grip. She eyes Joanne in her bra and underwear as if they were in public. “What the hell do you feed this kid? Your fridge is empty.”
“I tried to feed him earlier. He wasn’t hungry.”
“Well, he’s hungry now.”
“He can have baby food.”
Lou bangs baby food jars on the counter. “All you’ve got is pudding. He can’t live on pudding.”
“He won’t eat anything green.”
“You’ve got to make him. You’re his mother.” Lou slams the cupboard doors one after another. “Jesus, Joanne, when was the last time you went shopping?”
“There’s plenty to eat.” Joanne opens the cupboard above the stove. A box of old saltines, some granola bars, Oreos, and a can of Cheez Whiz. She thrusts the crackers at her mother. “Here, he likes these,” she lies. Let Lou try to teach this kid something.
“Do you have any real cheese at least?”
Joanne checks, finds a hunk of cheddar hiding in the crisper drawer. “Here. Cut it small.”
Back in bed Joanne hits upon a solution. Poke a hole in each eardrum. How has she not thought of this before? Instead of removing her larynx, she could remove all sound. And the pain right along with it.
Having decided this is what she’ll do, she drifts between sleep and waking, remembering how the little girls fought—pulling rather than punching, each of them grasping for a hold on bare flesh, loose hair. Megan’s barrette snapped free and fell into the storm drain. She took the redhead by the hair then, shook her like a doll. “Let go!” the girl shrieked. Megan did. Wound through her fingers was a large clump of bright orange. The girl was crying and one of the boys muttered what sounded to Joanne like “tons,” but Tina told her later was “cunts,” and started toward them.
Joanne sits up to Lou yelling. For a moment she curls her face into repulsion. What have I done now? Then the words begin to line up.
She tears downstairs and finds her mother hitting the baby on the back. His mouth hangs open, eyes wide, color gone. Joanne shoves Lou away and fumbles with the high chair’s strap.
“God damn it! What did you do? What did you do to him?”
“Just a cracker. I gave him the cracker!”
Joanne pulls at the strap, screaming, “I can’t get him, I can’t get him!”
“Push!” Lou hollers. “Push the button, for Ch
rist’s sake!”
Joanne pushes and the straps pop free.
“On his back!” Lou keeps screaming. “Hit him on the back!”
Joanne hits him hard, slung over her left arm, praying for the first time in years—please God, please—but she can tell by the silence she hasn’t dislodged the cracker.
She puts him back in his high chair and sticks her finger down his throat, probing, afraid she will lacerate his windpipe, the panic closing out all time, all sound, all smells. She feels it way down, almost out of reach, the mush of Nabisco that will kill her.
“It’s okay, Mama’s here, Mama’s here. It’s okay.” Joanne circles through the living room, kitchen, and dining room, patting the sobbing boy while Lou follows.
“You told me he was used to it. Haven’t you been giving him crackers?”
“Yes, mother,” she lies again. “Did you break it up?”
“For Christ’s sake, he’s eight months old!”
Lou prepares to leave. Joanne tries to remember the last time she saw Tina and Megan. Someone took them away. A grandmother maybe. She is ashamed not to know, but that block of years is hazy, after her father moved to Florida and Lou failed her first two tries at the CPA exam.
Before her mother leaves, she puts a hand on the baby’s head. “I’m sorry, little guy. You all right?”
Joanne sees it again—Lou coming down the block that day, her anvil step and cold eyes testifying that she’d already been in the house, where the frosting bowl, cereal boxes, a mac and cheese pan and several dirty plates lay on the table next to Pacific Avenue. Then her eyes shifted to the boys’ dirty T-shirts and angry faces, and for a moment Joanne actually expected her to turn around, to deny them. Instead, Lou’s anvil pace quickened, a hard, relentless click, and she shouted, “Joanne, you okay?”
As Joanne jogged up the sidewalk, turning her back on those other, motherless children, pain spiked again, this time in her right ear, and the world fell away. All except her mother’s face, where she is sure she saw relief, which today, even more than then, saves her life.
GOLDENE MEDENE
Dr. Spencer looked up from his misery to the long, winding lines—dark eyes, brown clothes, the occasional red and yellow native costume—and each day before this and after seemed a wretched sameness to him, as if Ellis Island were a prison rather than a reception point, and he was the one locked inside. It made him wonder for the first time if these people were worth all the trouble.
Dr. Hauss, down the line, was new, so his inspection—just clubfeet and goiters—still took twice as long as it should. Waiting for him to finish, Spencer slumped against the metal railing and pressed his palms over his ears, gently rubbing his temples with his extended pinkie fingers, aware that he looked haggard, but not caring. These people’s murmurings—a dozen disparate languages ricocheting like a symphony of ignorance off the tile walls—made his head throb more than last night’s bottle of brandy. Who were they to judge him? Human flotsam. Desperate castoffs. They had no right. They did not know him.
The next person was a woman in her forties, then a man in his twenties, followed by a family of four who all had conjunctivitis. He passed them on, then stopped and glanced at their backs. Really? Had he run his finger under every eyelid? Of course. It was so automatic he did it without thinking.
Spencer reached for his face, then jerked his hand back. Damn her! He’d almost touched his eye without disinfecting. Spencer dunked his hands up to the wrists, splashing solution onto his instrument stand. It took only a moment to risk his sight, his whole life.
Just like it took Laura only a moment to excise him from hers. Six words—I don’t want to marry you—had reduced thirty years of confidence, work, friends, and good looks to the simple, ridiculous fear of not being good enough to love. It felt as though she’d stamped his forehead “undesirable” and he would walk around trying to hide under his hat the rest of his life, tripping over obstacles with his brim pulled down too far. Spencer wasn’t sure whether or not to believe what she had said—that there was no one else—but what did it matter? Was it better or worse than what his sister had said—that Laura came from a different class of people. “I’m surprised she ever went out with you.”
While Hauss muddled through the next large family, Spencer absently arranged the things on his stand—a row of blue chalk, a flat piece of metal like a buttonhook for inverting eyelids, a notebook for interesting observations and a gold-plated, new ballpoint-style pen Laura had given him. Spencer opened his notebook and looked at his name, written with the pen in the top left-hand corner of the inside cover. The crisp lines of his signature, the perfectly round dots between his M and his D, suddenly seemed a mockery. He decided to throw the pen out as soon as he could get a different one.
Spencer had gotten a job on Ellis Island right after he finished his training and last year he’d been promoted to the eye and brain man, responsible for diagnosing trachoma, a highly contagious infection that caused blindness, and mental deficiencies. Like all the physicians, he used blue chalk to mark his diagnosis on the person’s shoulder, in his case CT for trachoma and a circled X for the deranged and retarded. Inspectors further down the line separated people based on their marks. People marked with CT were sent to the infirmary for a second check. If confirmed for trachoma, they joined those with a circled X back on the boat, bound for wherever they started. Which is why Spencer’s position was left to the most experienced.
Finally Hauss sent up a group of eight and Spencer worked through, starting youngest to oldest—the best way since younger kids got scared off if they saw him use the buttonhook.
Done, he leaned on his podium, head in his hands. God, Hauss was so damn slow! Perhaps he could go to the administrator’s office and tell them he was ill. Who would question a doctor’s diagnosis of himself? But with Hauss’s speed, if he went home sick, they might have to shut the whole line down for the day. People whose relatives were waiting for them to disembark would get stuck on the boats. Maybe he could at least get a damn chair to sit on. Wasn’t he entitled to that much? A chair? He was a doctor after all.
Spencer pushed his glasses up on his tall nose and rubbed his eyes, then glanced quickly at his hands. What the hell was wrong with him? He never touched his eyes at work. Had he remembered to disinfect? Of course, he hadn’t seen a case of trachoma all day. Still.
He dipped his hands in the bowl of disinfectant on the stand’s lower shelf. Some of the doctors on the Island didn’t bother with this precaution—as if they had no common sense at all. Sometimes, seeing this, Spencer wondered if he should feel proud of his job. Was it true what Laura had implied, that only the desperate take a job on the Island? Spencer’s father owned a grocery. He had no medical connections. So what of it?
A man approached with red, watery eyes. Spencer swirled his instrument in the disinfectant, flipped up the man’s eyelid and ran his finger along the underside. It took only a second to feel the white granules. The man forced his eye shut, face wrinkled in outrage, and muttered something in Yiddish. Trachoma and the Jews. They had it the worst, especially of late.
Spencer marked him on the shoulder with a CT, then smiled kindly, eager not to alarm him—he looked as though he could be trouble—and motioned for him to go on ahead.
Waiting for the next group, he scanned the lines, focusing on the women, wondering what they thought of him. Were they ashamed to have a strange man touch them? Or did they admire him, a doctor, an American? Did they resent him for judging them or seek his approval gladly, like a child seeks a parent’s?
Spencer washed his hands again, straightened his tie, then glanced up. Laura stood in front of Hauss. Laura? The same crackly red hair, like fall leaves. The same white neck. The mole? Was it there? Hauss had his hand on the woman’s neck, checking for goiters. She looked afraid and angry. Spencer’s stomach felt bound like a tourniquet on a wound. He knew now: that’s what Laura went to last night. Someone else’s touch.
He passed the
next two people without the mental exam—they seemed good enough, just go—and picked up a fresh piece of chalk, rolling it slowly between his hands, the dust leaving blue trails in his fingerprints.
Fredek held his book high so that he could appear to be reading while actually watching the pretty girl from their ship. Her name was Macia, but he thought of her as Goldene because she’d told him that’s what the Jews called America, Goldene Medene.
She approached the first man along the pipe and he took her throat in his hands. He seemed to be massaging it, which Fredek thought a strange way to greet someone.
Fredek began to scratch his head, but the Old Loaf slapped his hand away before he could get any satisfaction. “How many times do I have to tell you? You want them to think you have lice? Hm?”
Fredek smiled and stuck his hand in his pocket. At least she was moving again. For weeks his grandmother had sat on her bunk aboard ship as if she were a baker’s sample, long gone stale in the window. Fredek couldn’t even remember seeing her get up to use the toilet. Now that they were on land, her body had begun to expand to its normal shape, which he thought of as a paczki, sweet and thick and soft.
If he had asked her, Wicktoria would have said she was more like a dinner roll—hard crust, good slash across the top for bursting. She’d have explained to him there was nothing to worry about, though. It was only natural after weeks of sitting in rail offices, waiting in ticket lines, riding on strange buggies, walking on unfamiliar roads and sleeping in common beds that she’d become flattened, like unleavened bread. Which was fine. Such bread lasted longer.
And last she would have to. The journey had taken an extra week due to rough waters, and then they’d been forced to sit on board, just off the coast, for three days waiting for the Island to clear. On day two the rumor started that they were not going to be let off at all, that the whole ship would be turned around and sent back. In the wavering darkness of steerage Wicktoria had listened to the mumblings in Magyar and Russian, Yiddish and German, and tried to remain flat. No hope. No fear. These were the opposite ends of useless.
