The Sunset Gang

by Warren Adler

  "Canasta?" the thin man asked.

  Itch nodded.

  "You'll be doing it every day. Like me." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Like them."

  "What are we going to do about it?"

  "You're asking me? I'm one of the schmucks."

  He'd said it loud enough for the other men to hear. They turned their faces toward him.

  "Another schmuck," the thin man said. The men laughed.

  Itch felt embarrassed. He hated to be the center of attention, but before he had a chance to gather his courage, one of the other men pulled a huge set of woman's panties from his load in the dryer, held it up in front of his belly and wiggled his hips.

  "You're a lucky man," another man said. He held up a large pair of panties and looked at the group with mock-sad drooping eyes.

  Itch noticed a woman standing alone near one of the machines. She looked up and clicked her tongue.

  "Disgusting," she said, shaking her head.

  "Listen carefully," the man with few teeth said. "The yenta comments."

  "Grown men," the woman said. "You should be ashamed." She quickly gathered up her clothes and started toward the door.

  "Yenta, Yenta, Cockamenta," the man who held the large-size panties yelled.

  The woman turned at the door and pointed a finger at the man. "A bunch of putzes," she said.

  The men roared at her agitation. Even Itch found himself laughing. It was the first time, he discovered with wonder, that he had had a belly laugh since coming to Sunset Village.

  "The yentas are everywhere. A whole army of them," the man with the missing teeth said.

  Itch noticed that few of the machines were whirring, but that the men were still standing around.

  "Yenta, Yenta, Cockamenta," the man holding the big drawers said, squeezing the remark for more laughs.

  "Ziggy's a scream," the man with the missing teeth said. "He keeps us laughing for hours on end."

  A woman strained to see into the little house from the doorway. She squinted and held a pail of dirty wash. Her hair was henna-red and her powdered face flat white, like an apparition.

  "It's Molly Fine," someone yelled.

  "How's Sam's teeth, Molly?"

  "If you had any feelings, you wouldn't make fun."

  "It's only his teeth, Molly," one of the men said. "It could be something worse."

  "They could pull out his schmeckel," Ziggy whispered and they all roared.

  "Come in, yenta," one of the men said.

  "Oi, they're still there," she said to herself, but loud enough for them to hear.

  "We're still here, yenta," one of the men shouted. The others laughed.

  "I'll tell the condominium office."

  "So tell."

  "There are plenty of machines open, yenta."

  "I don't need that. You'll give me a headache. I'll come later. A bunch of nudniks."

  Itch could not tell if there was genuine animosity in the woman's voice.

  "Is she angry?" he asked the man with the missing teeth.

  "Not angry."

  "Then why won't she come in?" Itch asked.

  "Like she said. We're a bunch of nudniks. We'll give her a headache."

  "You don't give me a headache," Itch said.

  "You're not a yenta."

  "No. Definitely not that."

  "You see," the man with the missing teeth said, holding up a finger, as if he might be giving a lesson of the Talmud, "this, Sunset Village, is the world of the yentas. The yentas control it. They own it. It was created for them. Finally they have realized their life dream about having a place where the yenta is queen."

  Itch watched him, a smile breaking over his face. The other men huddled around listening, jabbing elbows into each other's ribs.

  "But not here," the man with the missing teeth said slowly. He lifted his hand high, finger stiff. "But not in this place."

  The men clapped their hands in exaggerated applause. Two of them lighted cigars and leaned against the machines. Itch watched them.

  "Well, then," Itch said, understanding. "Then this is the place to be."

  His machine had stopped and he bent down to remove the damp clothes and transfer them to the dryer. The man with the missing teeth stooped to help him.

  "I'm Hymie Kugelman," he said. "I've been here two years. From the Concourse. You know the Concourse?"

  "No. I'm from Brooklyn."

  "Brooklyn?" one of the men said. It was the one who had held up the panties.

  "Crown Heights," Itch said.

  "I'm from Sheepshead Bay. I was with the Post Office there for thirty years."

  "No wonder it got so screwed up."

  "Before that I was in Brownsville."

  "Brownsville?" Itch said, lifting his head from the wash. "So was I."

  "Where did you live?"

  "Douglass Street. Between Dumont and Livonia," Itch said, the memory of Jake's returning.

  "I lived on Barret Street, between Sutter and Pitkin."

  "A few blocks," Itch said. "You went to P.S. One-fifty-six?"

  "Right."

  "I went to One-eight-three."

  "Landsman," the man with the panties said.

  Itch held out his hand to the man.

  "I'm Itch." He felt his heart lurch with happiness as the man grasped his hand. "Itch Kramer."

  "I'm Heshy Sheinberg. This is Izzy Klein. There's Arbie Rosenberg and Mitty Katz, and Sunny Hirschberg and Immy Rosen."

  Itch shook hands all around and listened to their talk while the dryer hummed and eventually stopped. But he continued to linger, listening to the talk of sports and politics and children and women and sometimes the old days, but they did not dwell on them. After about an hour the men began to leave and he gathered up his dried laundry and left.

  Sadie came home for lunch, which he had made, and they ate their tuna-fish sandwiches and drank their coffee and talked.

  "You did the wash?"

  "Yes. It was very simple."

  "They want me to play in a regular morning game. I told them I had a husband, that I couldn't neglect him."

  He noted that she was seeking protestation. It was an old ruse that ran on well-rutted tracks. She used the same device to fish for compliments.

  He finished his sandwich and washed down the remains with the coffee, knowing she was waiting patiently for his consent, which she knew, surely, would come. But he did not want to appear too anxious. A frown washed over his face. Perhaps she really did feel that she was neglecting him.

  "You go," he said finally.

  "You sure you won't mind?" She was telling him that he would have to do more of the household chores, to make them lunch, to do the laundry. Thinking about the laundry warmed him.

  The next morning, he could hardly wait for her to leave and he searched the small condominium for laundry to be done. Unfortunately he couldn't find any but eyed the towels that hung neatly on the rack in the bathroom. They had been used only once. There were also his pajamas and his underwear and shirts and socks from yesterday--a paltry load, hardly worth the dollar.

  When he arrived at the little brick house, most of the men had already assembled and were lounging about. The narrow room was oddly silent and although he noticed baskets of clothes at the foot of the washing machines, he saw that few garments in the skimpy piles were dirty.

  "Itch."

  The name came to him as a favorite musical phrase, a toe-tapping tune. He felt as if a light turned on inside of him.

  "Waddysay, Itch?" another man said.

  "It's old Itch." It was the man with the missing teeth.

  "Hi, Itch."

  He wanted to respond. He had remembered all their names. But his throat had constricted and his eyes misted as he turned away and made believe he was fiddling with the coin slot, feeling the sweet heaviness of happiness in his heart.

  An Unexpected Visit

  Whenever Harold Weintraub drove through the imposing brick gates of Sunset Village, past
the fancy colonial gatehouse, which could summon up images of verboten wasp country clubs, he would smile and shake his head. Under all these trappings, he told himself, the big showy clubhouse, the neatly clipped Florida grass, the little blue ponds and dredged canals, the gaily painted mini-bus trains, the tricycles with their pennants crinkling in the breeze, lay, at least in his own mind, the unalterable fact that this was merely a dumping ground for aged Jewish parents of a certain working-class social strata. They were the Jews who never really made it big, a counterstereotype, a far cry from the usual "goyishe" perceptions of the rich kike who knew how to make all that money.

  But this time Harold Weintraub wasn't smiling, nor did all those philosophical musings interfere with his concentration on how to find his father's condominium. They all look alike, he told himself with exasperation, as he maneuvered the rented car over the high slow-down bumps and squinted at the street signs. He hadn't even bothered to telephone his father--which would not be unusual in itself, since he hated to talk to his father on the phone, even under ordinary circumstances. The instrument had become a conduit of hostility, the conversations a frustrating exercise in noncommunication.

  "Hey, Pop. It's Harold."

  "Whoopee."

  "How are you doing?"

  "Three months, Harold?"

  "You going to start again, Pop?"

  "Three months?"

  "If that's all you're going to say, I'll hang right up."

  "I can't understand. A boy doesn't call his father for three months."

  "Pop. It's long distance."

  "When are you going to come down?"

  "Maybe in February."

  "That's what you said last February."

  "I'm busy as hell, Pop."

  "Sure."

  "Really."

  "Three months. Not to pick up the telephone."

  He maneuvered the car into a court, then noting the unfamiliarity, backed up onto the main road again. In the five years since his father had come down to Sunset Village from Brooklyn after his mother had died, he had been here exactly three times, spending no more than four hours straining for conversation, until the atmosphere became stultifying and, he sensed, even his father had had enough and was itching to get on with the rhythm of his life. There was a certain ritualization about each visit. The mandatory visit to the clubhouse and the pool to "show him off" to his father's cronies, male and female, all of whom resembled each other.

  "My son Harold. This is Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzman. Mr. Pomerantz. Mr. Berkowitz."

  "So good-looking," he would hear one of the yentas whisper.

  "A professional?"

  "He's a toy manufacturer," his father would say. "You know the game 'Foreign Policy'?"

  "Adult games actually," Harold would say politely.

  "A big shot," his father would say, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, happy in his moment, a kind of triumph, parading his progeny. "To me they're toys."

  Invariably the conversation would drift toward his marital status, as if he were an old-maid schoolteacher, a familiar image for his father, who had spent thirty years as a carpenter for the New York school system.

  "All right, Harold, I'm sorry I asked," the old man would retort--the subject, Harold knew, was always on the surface of his father's mind.

  "Actually I'm living with a girl," Harold had told him on his last visit. They had been walking along the edge of the road and the old man had stopped and turned his tanned face to his son, narrowing myopic eyes.

  "Living with?"

  "It's not that my honor is at stake, Pop. It's the accepted way. Neither of us want marriage. Believe me, it's better. When you can't stand each other any more, you split."

  The old man shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe it's better."

  They resumed their walk. Harold waited for the inevitable.

  "Jewish?"

  "As a matter of fact, no."

  The old man shrugged again.

  "A shiksa," he said, rubbing it in, thinking of how Janice's obviously Irish face would stand out like a beacon in this place.

  "You can't find a nice Jewish girl and settle down?" his father said angrily.

  He could see the old man's face flush beneath the tan. "I am settled."

  "And children. What about children?"

  "Who the hell wants kids?"

  "There you may have a point," his father said, sticking a gnarled finger near his nose. Then the old man's shoulders sagged and they had walked slowly back to his place without a word.

  But he wouldn't go without an explanation and when they had gotten back to his father's place, he felt the need to say more.

  "Pop"--he said it gently--"times have changed. It's different now. Freer. Women, too, want this kind of freedom. That's not to say that someday I won't get married and have kids. There's no need for commitment, that's all. Janice. Her name is Janice. We care for each other. We have a lot in common. She's twenty-six, with a great job. Hell, she even shares expenses. Look, I'll be thirty-one on my next birthday. I've got time. Lots of time."

  "You have time," his father said. "I got no time."

  Harold remembered the conversation, even through his concentration, as he searched for his father's place, cursing the builder and his mass-produced look-alike two-storied product, the barracks architecture, the sameness. He parked in front of a small structure around which people were clustered. It was the laundromat. Eyes turned toward him. He was obviously an event. Men and women came toward him. He held out a piece of paper with his father's address on it, like a greenhorn immigrant lost in the middle of Times Square.

  "About a quarter of a mile in that direction," a gray-haired man said. He wore a sour expression. A woman in a flowered house dress stood beside him.

  "What's his name?"

  "Weintraub."

  "Weintraub. Weintraub," the woman mused aloud. "Harry Weintraub?"

  "Morris."

  "He used to be in the fish business in Philadelphia?" the woman asked. The gray-haired man rolled his eyes skyward and lifted his hands palms upward.

  "No. Morris Weintraub. The New York Weintraub," the younger man said.

  "A quarter of a mile that way," the gray-haired man said, motioning toward the woman with his hand as if she were suffering from body odor.

  "From Philadelphia?" he heard the woman ask again as he stepped back into the car.

  Kuchlefel, he thought, remembering an expression of his mother--Yiddish slang that meant a spoon in everybody's pot. Odd how that world still survived, in his mind, in these people. He followed the road slowly, watching for bumps, stopping while a train of tricycles passed, the older men and women chatting as they passed, smiling like kids in organized play at a summer camp.

  What the hell was he doing here? he wondered. In the middle of the week. Away from his office in the middle of the week.

  He had actually felt the compulsion to go at three A.M. as he tossed in bed, hearing Janice's even breathing beside him. He had quietly slipped out from under the covers and padded to the living room, fished into the cigarette box, lighting up and inhaling, something he had not done for years. It went down harsh and he stifled a cough.

  "I forgot," Janice had said simply. She had broken the news to him at dinner and he had felt the lamb chop turn to lead in his stomach.

  "How can you forget?"

  "Believe me. It's easy."

  "It's like playing Russian roulette."

  "Yeah," she had said with heavy sarcasm. "Goddamned diaphragm. Ah did'in know wad luv can do," she mimicked.

  "How was I supposed to know?"

  Her eyes misted. She reached out and patted his arm.

  "It's my fault, kid. A stiff cock and my memory turns to glop."

  "Jesus. It's not funny."

  "I'm not laughing." She sighed. "No sweat. I'll have the pussy vacuumed and that will be that."

  "Our kid?"

  "It's my body." She looked at him archly. "Hey, which side are you on? I'm the Catholic, remember
."

  "How long has it been?" He must have looked very serious, reflective. A brief frown, perhaps a sudden tug of truth, wrinkled her face like a bolt of lightning. Feeling his own embarrassment, he checked himself from making any further clinical inquiries. But it was too late. She had caught his drift.

  "I'm four weeks over. The rabbit test is positive. It's well within the limits of an easy abortion. It's just a few hours out of my day and a little rest, that's all. I'll take off Friday and be back to work Monday. So it'll louse up our weekend." They had planned a country drive. She had chucked him under the chin. "Look, kid. It happens."

  He took her in his arms and kissed her hair, watching his own face in the mirror behind her. He felt his unhappiness and pressed her closer.

  "I love you," he whispered.

  "Jeezuz," she said, moving apart and watching his eyes. "It's not the end of the world."

  Which was precisely the point of his own uneasiness. He had sat up half the night and chain-smoked, mulling it over. My kid, he thought, picturing a young boy, perhaps as he had been. It was then that he thought of his own father and the gnarled workman's hands that he had clutched on endless walks through parks and zoos and parades and circuses. This is stupid, he told himself when dawn poked through the edges of the blinds and, smashing out the cigarette, he crawled into bed quietly beside her. She slept peacefully. Perhaps it didn't matter.

  But the idea of it would not go away. As a faraway abstraction abortion had always seemed right, attractive actually since it foreclosed on the complication of unwanted progeny. It's an option, a choice, he told himself, arguing that it was a sensible approach to a biological problem. My God, he told himself, deliberately keeping himself stiff beside her, that's not the issue, it's my damned kid.

  In the morning, he told her that he was going to go down and visit his father for the day. She looked up quickly, doughnut poised in mid-air, dripping coffee drops on the front page of The New York Times.

  "He okay?"

  "I think so. I'm feeling a little pang of guilt, I guess. Haven't seen him for nearly two years. It's a light week anyway. What the hell? It's only a day."

  "Nice Jewish boys," she said sprightly, a broad smile breaking.

  Was she as concerned? What did the abortion mean to her? He wanted to ask, but felt himself waiting for something, a message, a signal. It never came, only the brief rustle of the paper as she turned the page.