Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

“You’re right, Maria!” she said breathlessly, trying to avoid a pot of Greek beans. “It’s what I’ve been telling them about for months. All we have to do is form a food co-op. Food collective. You know. Every week—or depending on how we decide to set it up—somebody else, very early in the morning, can go up to the market at Hunt’s Point. The savings are incredible! And besides, you find out all about these fantastic new vegetables.” Reba widened her eyes and luxuriously licked at her cheesy finger as if she were right then and there savoring a vegetable whose taste she had never before known.

  “Glasses?” Maria said, back in the living room, her eyes searching, her hands out. “Cups? No? Nothing? You used paper? Good! Ah! Wineglasses, I’ll be very careful, don’t worry. But what you’ll do with all that cheese, I don’t know.”

  Reba said, “Come on, Maria! You’re on my side. What do you think?”

  Maria shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well, it’s already all so runny and ripe. You can’t use it tomorrow, we better eat it tonight. Brie, in any case, you can’t feed to the cat…Matthew! No TV! Come right now and help me dry! But be very careful—these are expensive, special wineglasses and anyway not ours.”

  “Maria!” Reba pleaded. “You could save a lot of money! You need to—I mean, we all need to. What about it? All we have to do is get them organized.”

  “That’s right, Reba,” Arthur said. “That’s the Ober-sturmfüihrer. She certainly can get them organized.”

  In the kitchen Louise watched Maria bang down a cast-iron frying pan and fill it with cooking oil. “Onions!” she cried out wildly, half to herself. “But never mind, I’m sure I have at least some.”

  “You see that?” Reba said, coming in to join her. “Do you have any idea how cheaply we could get them up there?”

  “Now I’ll maybe cry a little,” Maria said, rapidly peeling the onions. “Probably it’s good for me. What do you think?” She turned around, and seeing that it was Reba who stood next to her, she sliced down hard on her chopping board and, tossing her head in the direction of the onions, said, “Hunt’s Point! I anyway get up very early! And run out in a hurry to be with junkies! It’s what I do all day. And always being careful to watch my purse! And where I have the car—for stealings! I don’t for that need Hunt’s Point!”

  Joan yawned and, picking at the label of a wine bottle, said, “I think it is really dangerous up there. They had a whole series about it on television.”

  Maria threw the onions and chicken parts into the pan and, muttering “God damn it!” as the fat spurted out, repeated, “Hunt’s Point! Exactly what I don’t absolutely need—a bus-driving holiday!” She climbed up a stepladder, shoving around cans of food with the same frenzy which had woken Louise so early that same morning. “Bay leaves I know I definitely somewhere have, but mushrooms…Well! All right! Too bad, we’ll have to use cans and hope for no botulisms.”

  “A bus-driving holiday,” Arthur said, shaking his head. “I can see why that’s not for you. But what about a Firemen’s Ball? The helmets, the boots, the uniforms—just for old times’ sake.”

  On her way to the bathroom, Joan wobbled a bit in her clogs and called out, “Oh, Christ, Arthur! Don’t pay attention to him, Maria. He’s really disgusting.”

  “He is,” Maria agreed, and from the top rung of the stepladder began laughing so that she had to grasp the sink.

  “Why?” Arthur said, smiling. He carried in two of the big clay pots and emptied them into the garbage. “Why am I disgusting? I’m only giving her the encouragement to remember. Isn’t that what you pay thirty-five dollars an hour for? With the meter running?” He held on to the arms of the stepladder just below where Maria was standing, and said, “What do they know, Maria, liebchen? A bunch of skinny Jewish broads! Come on down and tell it all to Uncle Fritz before the U-boat comes back for you.”

  “Oh, shit!” Maria said, trying to steady herself, though, with her hand on her face, she was laughing and blushing. “You people!”

  “Ah hah!” Arthur wagged his finger in the air. “‘You people!’ Notice that? You people! Already she’s separating out the population.”

  Reba said, “I’m serious, Maria. You shouldn’t dismiss it so easily, you’re not being fair. For one thing, you’d be terrific at it—it involves a lot of bargaining. That’s the whole point of these wholesale markets. You buy in huge quantities and you bargain for the best price. You’d be absolutely perfect for it! I can just see you.”

  I did always exchanges from when I was very little, Maria had said. When I was very skinny.

  “Bay leaves I have,” she said now, throwing down a package. “Also some thyme. A pinch, only. A pitch? Mushrooms from cans, not great, but OK, we can use it. Wine-too much is already out, we’ll drink some. What else? I can make noodles, maybe, or rice, but French bread would definitely be better. Also later for the Brie. What do you think?”

  “If you’re really against going up there early in the morning, we could use your apartment to store things,” Reba said, and as she widened her eyes and licked her lips Louise thought of a child embarking in secret on a grownups’ project.

  Joan, in her clogs, came clattering back from the bathroom. “Shit,” she said crankily, pulling and picking at the threads of her shift. “This thing has split ends, I swear it. And it never even hung right. What should I do next time, Maria? Use a different pattern?”

  “I don’t use ever patterns. It’s not what I got used to and now, too bad, I have no patience. Come here to the light and let me see it.” Still on the stepladder, she held out her hand and waved it like a traffic cop. Or maybe, Louise thought, like a crane-driver: I drove then a giant something, Maria had said. It was very noisy.

  Stepping into the full bright light of the kitchen, Joan said, “My God, Maria! It smells fantastic in here! And you did it in about three minutes. What did you do?”

  “I didn’t yet put in the wine, it will then smell more fantastic. Matthew didn’t yet set the table…Matthew! Come here! Quickly, baby, angel! I think I’ll maybe send him down for French bread. Italian—it doesn’t matter…Look, Joan,” she said, stabbing the material. “Look right here. It’s not I think the pattern, it’s you. You did here a hemming stitch, but it’s a seam. For a seam, you must do a backstop—a backstitch…Entirely different!…Matthew! Take from my purse one dollar and not more. I think around the corner the little Spanish store is maybe open still, I hope. I can show you later a backstitch, Joan. It’s very easy, no problem…Matthew! Get your coat and go! Quickly! You have still to set the table.”

  Joan observed lazily, “I think it started to rain again. For a change.” She stretched and leaned her head all the way back so that her long, dark hair, in a pony tail for the freedom of the day, reached nearly to the seat of her dungarees. There was a certain restless languor about her still; she looked, for the moment, the way she must have years before—a teenager mooning around her mother’s kitchen. Was this what Julie did as soon as she got home?

  “A raincoat, Matthew!” Maria called out, but the door had already slammed.

  “I’ll set the table,” Louise said, but thought, really, that she was the one who should have gone out. She had still not taken off her coat and felt as if she alone were standing there, caught in a black-and-white frame while everyone else was moving around in color. Reba, for instance, was plumping up and down on her heels as if she were looking for something; perhaps her feet had merely fallen asleep. Still doing this, looking like someone on a pogo stick, she said, “Melissa won this enormous fish tank. I don’t mean a goldfish bowl—which die as soon as they hit the house anyway. It’s a tank. Huge! I told her we have no room for it, but she won it. How can you argue that with a six-year-old?”

  Maria said, “It’s what Matthew has. You keep it on the window sill. It fits.”

  “That’s what Bert told her. But the thing is, Maria, in her room the window sill is right on top of the radiator. We’d have poached tropical fish.”

  “Take
it to the country,” Joan said. She had taken her hair out altogether and was now braiding it listlessly.

  “They’ll die in the country. And then she won’t go to the toilet. That’s what happened every time we had to flush down the goldfish.”

  Maria poured wine into the pan, popped a mushroom into her mouth, and as the winy chicken smell rose up through the room, said, “Salt pork, that’s what I should really have. Or bacon grease.” She shrugged her shoulders, clanked an oversized lid on the pan, and said, “Reba, it’s exactly what Matthew has. I already told you. You put down on the window sill some asbestos, aluminum. It works. It’s only all that fish business is completely crazy—much too expensive. So—if they die, too bad. No more.”

  Joan said, “Maria, really you should have been here today. Maybe Matthew would have won some fish. And anyway, everybody missed you.”

  “I know,” Maria said grimly. “I met downstairs Larry Kopell.”

  “Don’t tropical fish—the mothers eat the babies?” Reba asked. “I’m not sure I want Melissa to see that.”

  “You can make then a terrarium, it’s the other thing you can do with a fish tank,” Maria said. “Some other things, too.” She was counting out plates and utensils, pulling things out from shelves and drawers. “We’ll set this table in here. A little crowded, but all right…Reba, is your husband coming?”

  Joan said, “You’re wrong, Reba. How else do you begin explaining about death? It’s better if they see it first with things like fish.”

  Reba began going up and down on her heels again and said, “Maria! What a terrific ideal I never would have thought of something like that! You should write a book about it. You know—all your sort of household hints and your projects! And then we could give out a copy to everyone who joins our food co-op!”

  Joan, looking serious, said, “I know it sounds brutal, but actually it means more with animals. It takes on more reality—the way farm children learn about it.”

  “Funny,” Arthur said, and smiled up at Louise so that she began having trouble with the place settings. “That’s not what I heard that farm children learn about naturally.”

  “What do you think, Maria?” Reba asked excitedly. “Isn’t it a good idea?”

  “What does she think!” Arthur nodded his head in mock gloomy derision. “What do you expect her to think about a goldfish? She was once running up gas bills on Grandpa. And don’t forget—those were the days before Easy-Off.”

  “Arthur!” Joan shrieked.

  “Oh, it’s all right, Joan,” Maria said, looking up in annoyance. “He does it only to provoke. And anyway, he’s part right. I can’t think about it the same way you do. I had, when I was ten, in my street, to pull out the dead bodies. From the houses, buildings that were, I don’t know—collapsed. First, really, to take them out and make sure. Because after bombings and so on there were still live people. Not so many. Some. Reba, if your husband is coming, Louise can put out now another place.”

  A very thin, blond, wan-looking child was walking hurriedly down the cobbled street of a small, tree-lined provincial town. Cobblestones, cuckoo clocks, and medieval architecture were strewn around her in terrible disarray, but she went on picking her way through the rubble, which she called “ruble,” foreshadowing the money she would one day be trying to earn. “God damn it, exactly what I can’t stand!” said this child as a falling brick just grazed her. She was wearing old dancing slippers which she knew to be unsuitable; but she did not believe—it was not in her mentality—to change clothes every time she went out of the house. The excessive thinness did not suit her either, and her hair was tied back by an underwear strap or a piece of sock which she had knitted herself and had intended to exchange on the black market—though not for chocolate, whose sweetness she could still not accustom herself to. She scowled up at the sky, exclaiming, “Again, God damn it! I think I’ll maybe move to Australia,” but this time she ducked out of the way in time. And tripped on what was clearly a person. Bending down, she began heaving away bricks and stones in frantic annoyance, and blowing away the dust and silt from the person’s face, she grabbed and slapped the arms, saying, “Come on, hurry up! Quickly! Or I’ll be late! Again!” It was impossible to tell what she could imagine she would be late for.

  Joan said, “Maria, there’s something I didn’t tell you and I really feel terrible…You know that—”

  “The telephone call from the hospital? Don’t worry about it, they’ll call again. It’s maybe about insurance money or something. I don’t know.”

  Arthur, pouring out wine, gave the first glass to Maria, who began drinking immediately. He said, “Insurance? On Sunday? Drink up, liebchen! You can use it!”

  Maria put down the wineglass, but she was laughing. Defensively she said, “Well, for anything else, how would they call up just one time? They would call—and then call and call again. I know. I’ve had already many emergencies.”

  Joan, looking stricken, put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, Maria, now I really feel terrible,” she said. “I fucked up everything…I even broke your coffee pot. But don’t worry—I’ll replace it. We’ll go to wherever you got it before.”

  “Where I got it before—a long time ago—was in a bank. From starting a new account. I was then so stupid I thought it made it free…Can you believe, Arthur, that I was once so stupid?” Maria smiled distantly into her wineglass.

  Joan said, “Oh my God, Maria! You mustn’t blame yourself for something like that. People do it all the time. Arthur’s cheapo idiot aunt in Long Beach practically lives that way. And besides, you were new in the country.”

  “Maybe we should do something along those lines,” Reba said, craning her happy, squirrel-like face to the side. “See if we can find someone to get us some wholesale woks. Or crêpe pans. And then give them out as an inducement. Although why should anyone need an inducement to join a food co-op?”

  “That’s one thing I don’t care,” Maria said. “If anyone thinks I’m a cheapskate, too bad!”

  Arthur refilled Maria’s glass and said, “That’s right, have some more. What do you care what people think? Prosit! Pretend it’s the Oktoberfest.”

  The downstairs bell rang, and Maria said, “Good! Here comes Matthew! Now we can eat, I’m hungry. And I’m anyway getting worried for his being out too long in the dark.”

  “Naturally!” Arthur said. “Where you come from, the only one who goes out in the dark is Dracula.”

  Already flushed from the wine, Maria giggled and said, “Dracula! That’s not even near! Americans never know anything about geography, I’m completely serious. Where I come from—or anyway, where I stayed in the country with my cousin Klaus—is the same place as Frankenstein. Near. It’s true.” She stood up, reached over for a large serving spoon, and, rapping it sharply on the frying pan, said, “Plates, everyone! Quickly! It will be much easier this way. Who likes only drumsticks?”

  Arthur held out plates for her and said, “Frankenstein! No wonder you never saw anything peculiar about Hitler or Stalin. That explains everything.”

  “Frankenstein was the man only, Arthur. Not the monster. People make always the same mistake…If anyone wants the wings, too bad. I’m saving them for Matthew.”

  “But that’s the whole point of the book, Maria,” Joan said. “That it’s impossible to make that kind of distinction.”

  “Frankenstein!” Arthur repeated just as Matthew came in. “What do you think of that, Matthew? Your mother comes from the same place as Frankenstein.”

  Matthew did not come over to the table. He put the long loaf of Italian bread down on the nearest empty space—a scratchy counter top—and in a small, unhappy voice said, “It got wet.” Matthew had gotten wet himself, and looked, Louise thought, as if he had brought the raw, rainy darkness inside with him. His glasses were fogged over, his light hair was plastered down; with the collar turned up, he seemed zippered into his green plaid jacket. It made his small face look pinched and pasty, and as water con
tinued dripping down him, he gave off a child’s winter smell of wet wool.

  Maria said, “Here, baby, angel. Look! Only wings—I saved them for you. Specially. Come.”

  Matthew took off his glasses and, rubbing his eyes with wet hands, said, “I’m not hungry. I don’t want anything.”

  “Wings, Matthew! Everyone else is already eating. Come on now, hurry up! Let’s have the bread.” And turning around to look at him, Maria said, “My God, Matthew! Why do you only stand there? What’s the matter with you? Take off the wet clothes!”

  Pulling his zipper listlessly, Matthew said, “Can’t I take it in to the television? Please.”

  “What? I can’t hear you, angel,” Maria said. She had pulled out a clean dish towel and was vigorously rubbing his head.

  “Could I have peanut butter and jelly and take it into the television with me?”

  “No. And no, Matthew,” Maria said, holding up two fingers. “Definitely. Two no’s.”

  Arthur said, “C’mere, Matthew.” Beckoning him over, he put his arm around Matthew as if he were about to tell him a secret and said, “Listen. I think there’s something you better tell your mother—it’s two eyes, one nose.”

  Joan pulled off a piece of Italian bread and, pointing with it, said, “You think he does that with his own children?”

  Happily straddling Arthur’s chair, Matthew continued to laugh. Arthur said, “Well, Matthew, what’d you do with your mother today? Cross a couple of borders? Did you have a good time?”

  Matthew made a face and said, “Yucchy,” as if he were thinking of Rebecca’s fat hands.

  “Matthew, you know that’s what I hate always. When you say that. It’s first very babyish—from TV maybe. And second, it’s anyway not a real word. If you want to answer Arthur, if you want to say something, then say it. But say a word.”

  “A word,” Matthew said and, bursting out again, could not contain his own hilarity.

  “You should have let him go to the Block Party, Maria,” Joan said. “The kids all had such a good time. They were running up and down the street all day—we practically didn’t even see them.”