Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  “You’re not a real cop,” she says.

  “I am security,” he says. “Now you keep quiet. I want to ask you a few questions.”

  She’s quiet for a minute, as if waking from a dream and looking around. Or falling into one and looking around. What has she got herself into? she’s wondering.

  “Now where are you going?”

  “To New Brunswick,” she says.

  “And do you live there?”

  “My brother’s there,” she says. “He goes to Rutgers.”

  “You’re going to visit your brother?”

  “That’s right.”

  Light at the end of the tunnel, and they’re coming up onto the road that curves around in New Jersey, with the view of the city, and the rest of the way—a lot of people think this is sad—the rest of the way is Jersey.

  “He goes to Rutgers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you go to some fancy school in the city?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which school?”

  “Dalton.”

  “I never heard of that one.”

  “It’s just a school.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “That’s all it is.”

  “And your brother goes to Rutgers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re going to visit him?”

  “You know, if you’re not a real cop, I don’t see why you think you can ask me all these questions.”

  “I ask the questions. Now. What were you doing out there? Were you hooking? Or just playing games?”

  “Hooking?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hooking? You mean . . . ? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Am I kidding? You are kidding if you think I don’t know what you was up to.”

  “I wasn’t up to anything except trying to get a ride to New Brunswick.”

  “So now you got one.”

  “Are you going all the way?”

  “I’m going to take you where you want to go. I’m . . .”

  “Security,” she finishes for him. This makes him laugh.

  “You’re a smart little bitch, ain’t you?”

  “Really,” she says. “What kind of a thing is that to say? This isn’t some TV movie, you know.”

  “What’s that?” he says. “TV movie? What’s that? You trying to bullshit me, girl? Well, forget about it, you hear? ’cause along with security, you know what comes?”

  “No, what?”

  “Along with security comes heavy manners, that’s what.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You never heard of heavy manners? At your Dalton School, you never took up the question of revolution in the Caribbean?”

  “No, we didn’t,” she says. “Next year we’re supposed to study American history. We’re doing Europe now.”

  “Europe,” he says with a snort as they’re turning onto the turnpike. Or maybe they’re further down the road by now, I’m not sure of this.

  “You don’t like Europe?”

  “Europe,” he says again with a funny sound in his nose. “Old shit.”

  “My father was born there,” she says.

  But the man from security doesn’t pay attention to that. He’s studying the oil tankers as they’re driving past, the factories pumping out smoke, the bridges, the towers, as though it’s them he steers by, not the road signs.

  “New Brunswick,” he says.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll take you all the way,” he says.

  “Hey,” she says, “thanks. You don’t have to.”

  “I know I don’t have to. But I will.”

  “Hey, good,” she says. “Hey, good.”

  “Used to have a uncle lived there, in New Brunswick,” he says. “I know the place. University—lots of white kids, some black, a few spics, Italians. You know what I mean?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Mixed,” he says. “It’s a mixed place.”

  He glances over at her, as if giving her a sly look, and she notices that in the daylight his skin looks beautiful, like varnished wood. Dark wood. But wood that breathes. She looks at her own pale, freckled hand, the knuckles, the tiny cuticles. This hand she wants to dip in clay and make pots, she’s deciding right then and there. Don’t ask why. Maybe because she’s riding down the middle of the ugliest part of Jersey and she wants to make beautiful things to stand against the filth and the dirt and the smoke and the fire. Could it be? She asked herself but didn’t get an answer. Riding through this wasted land, she calls it, from a poem she’s reading at the Dalton School.

  “You like the mixed?” he asks her.

  “Do I like it?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.” Noticing that her school skirt, the green and blue plaid, has risen up over her freckled knees, she tugs it back down. “But I guess I like it.”

  “The Muslims say no.”

  “Do they?”

  “They say no. And most white folks say no.”

  “They do?”

  “They do. You’re a little girl. You don’t know. You don’t hear. But listen harder. You’ll hear better.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You suppose right. And if they say no and the Muslims say no, I say, what the hell can the Muslims be right if they agree with the white?”

  “I . . .”

  “Not a question. That’s my answer. I say the Muslims can’t be right if they agree with the white.” He looks around and sees the exit sign he wants—see, they are further down the road than I thought. They are driving right off onto the highway for New Brunswick now, and Sarah is feeling all right—given the circumstances—but she still doesn’t know what she’s doing there, I mean, she just left school and started off for New Brunswick, why? Does she know? She certainly doesn’t. All she has is a feeling, go see Rick—Rick Sommer, your grandson, once the youth leader from the Purim dance.

  First, he was political science, now you should be proud, Rose, an assistant dean at Rutgers, the youngest dean in charge of students, and things like that. He’s told you, I’m sure, you’ve heard—this is the so-called brother she is lying about. But if she feels for him like a sister, this is something she has yet to find out. Maybe it’s what she’s going to find out.

  All through high school she’s gone out with a lot of boys, and they either want to take advantage of her or go with her because she’s the rabbi’s daughter—oi, remember the pale-faced boy from the city who smelled so bad to me? that’s what he wanted, something like that, not me, but what I stood for in some dream of a delusion—but what? the farmer’s daughter? but who can know? He’s ashes, now, along with so many of the rest of them who stayed behind—and if he was alive, by some miracle, what would he say? He wouldn’t remember, I’m sure, because the young boys, they don’t remember as well as the young girls, this, of all the things I’m telling you, I believe more than anything, because the girls don’t need things like the boys, souvenirs, like Manny’s piece of broken milk bottle in the star shape, because girls have memories better than boys, don’t ask me why, it has to do maybe with the fact that they bear children, they bear them instead of just planting the seed for them, and the garden remembers better than the seed or the sower. I don’t know. Who knows? This is just what I think, what I believe. And I’m telling in the middle of this story, I suppose, because what comes next I don’t like to remember, sure, because it’s painful, for her, for me.

  They’re driving through the downtown in New Brunswick, there where it’s all cleared for the renewal except it hasn’t yet started to be renewed and so it’s just empty, block after block, like pictures of after the war in the old country, but here it’s not supposed to be a war but helping people, building better places to live except it looks like a battle has happened here and they’re just starting to figure out that they want to clean up the mess, and he’s telling her, this black man in un
iform, and come to think of it he could look like a soldier in a certain light, he’s saying,

  “This ain’t urban renewal, this is Negro removal.”

  And she’s nodding, yes, yes, wondering, why am I riding with him? if she’s wondering anything. To be perfectly frank with you I don’t think that in this time she was wondering anything, because considering how she told to me her story I don’t think she knew much, she had a blank, a blackout, from the time she left school, not a blackout in memory but in—what do you call it?—in morals? in rules? in feeling herself part of what was going on? I don’t know how to describe it because personally I never felt that way and though I never felt some of the things like my Manny or my Maby—yes, I call her that, my Maby, after all—I can sympathize, but with this girl, a modern child, I find it difficult to sympathize not because I don’t want to but because I can’t find the feelings. I look for them inside myself but I can’t find them. I’m trying, so bear with me, darling, bear with me. I don’t mean my feelings for her, you understand, I mean the feelings she feels when she’s in a situation like this or like that, her feelings for the world—unless, God forbid, in a situation like this, her feelings are not there, and it’s a blank in her heart, oi, I hope it’s not so, but when I feel around in my heart to try and get a grip on hers I feel nothing, it’s like trying to hug the air, and God forbid that she should live like this—no one should have to live like this, no one would want to live like this, day in, day out, through a lifetime.

  So it was contemporary, no, I don’t mean that, I mean, temporary, the way she was feeling or not feeling in the car on the drive through the town on the way—on the way to where? to see this boy your grandson she had been talking to for years, she just got the idea that she had to see him and talk about things, things she needed to talk about, things she needed advice about, because she had the idea that because he had seen her through some bad times with her mother and father, like the night of the Purim dance, he might be able to help her now.

  With what?—that’s the question. With the problem that she couldn’t feel anything about anything except that she couldn’t feel.

  “What’s that address you want?” her driver asked.

  She had a street for her friend your grandson, Rick now the dean, she had a street number.

  “That’s the other side of the river,” the man said.

  She nodded, watching buildings roll past, students on the streets in long hair and jeans, books under their arms, this was a school, a university, and it appealed to her somewhere in the back of her mind, so she was thinking of something if she wasn’t feeling nothing. And then they crossed a bridge, and there was a large hill and they took a road up the hill and rolled past shabby houses, student housing a sign said, and the next thing she knew they were turning in to a vast parking lot near the round heights of a stadium.

  “Last stop,” he said.

  “This isn’t where I want,” she said. Her voice was flat. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t even annoyed.

  “Everybody out,” he said.

  “There’s nothing here,” she said.

  “I’m tired of driving,” he said, adjusting the lapel of his uniform coat. Security, the patch said. Two yellow arrows crossed on a green field.

  “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “You know where you’re going?”

  “I’ll walk,” she said, her hand on the door handle.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Here.”

  He unloosened his pants then, and he tugged out his, what should I call it? his dangling dark tube. She had never seen anything like it—poor dear, she had never seen circumcised, uncircumcised, felt maybe, but never seen. But did she scream? did she panic? A spider used to scare the girl, a mosquito, a fly. But if this new view of things gave her any worry whatsoever you wouldn’t know it.

  “What?” she said again, looking out the windowshield at where the stadium rose roundly up against the paling blue horizon. In her mind she imagined cheers, football cheers, rah, rah, Rutgers rah, and don’t ask where she knew the cheer unless she’d heard it on the television because she’d never been here to this stadium before. In her mind she could hear music she remembered, snatches of songs from, of all things, the temple service, songs about the Sabbath bride, and her beetles, stones, doors, she heard them, I want to hold your hand, baby, light my fire, and she was feeling warm in her own temples, warm at her neck, warm in her shoulders, and her chest was tingling, tingling, as though I, me, her grandmother was rubbing her aching little chest with Vaporub the way I did when she was a sickly child.

  “Some guys.”

  “What?”

  “Some guys would want a blow job.” Feh! feh! such language, such talk! but this was what he said!

  “What?”

  “But I am not that type.”

  “What?”

  “You can just use your hand if that’s what you need to do.”

  She shook her head.

  “See, I’m a nice guy.”

  “Sure,” she said, opening the door and climbing out.

  “I’m security,” he called after her but didn’t make a move to follow.

  Some security, I would have said and spit on his thickening stick before leaving the car, but my Sarah, Sadie, she didn’t say no more.

  Next thing she knows, though, as she’s crossing the parking lot the car starts up and starts following along behind.

  Beep-beep! he taps the horn. “Security!”

  She turns and sticks into the air her middle finger.

  The engine growls louder.

  She starts walking fast.

  The engine growls nearer.

  She breaks into a run.

  There’s a field, and a small woods behind the stadium, and in a minute or two she’s in the trees, walking in what she thinks is the direction of the river, downhill, downhill. Once or twice she falls—her skirt and blouse by now look a mess, and by the time she reaches the road she’s got mud on her hands and knees, the smiling part of her knee, dimpled, where the socks don’t cover. It takes a while for her to walk across the bridge, because midway she stops and looks down at the flowing water, thinking, what if? but why? what if? but why? over and over, and she’s thinking what if the security fiend follows her, what will she do, so when he pulls up alongside her and calls through the open window of the car,

  “Hey, girl!”

  She will simply turn and keep on walking.

  What would have happened if the real Rutgers security didn’t come by I don’t know, but a real cop in a real car with a mean look comes up behind the other driver, and he gets him to speed up, and then he slows down, and he leans from the window and says,

  “Was he bothering you?” This man is also black, but in a different spirit, and she shakes her head no, and keeps on walking. He follows her across the bridge, with cars backing up, about three of them, behind him, and she sneaks a look at the sluggish brown river as she walks, and then as she starts walking in the direction of the campus, he speeds up and passes her, but then in a few minutes while she’s still walking—it’s some distance, let me tell you—he circles around and comes back again, watching, a real security man, and thanks to him my granddaughter gets to the college in one piece.

  So she can fall to pieces. I don’t know what’s going on with her mind. Like mother like daughter? I’m not sure because everything I know about the mother, like I told you, makes me think that she at least knew what she was doing all the time and maybe couldn’t help herself. While this girl could help herself but didn’t always know what she was doing.

  And then, so finally, she walks past a park and finds some buildings that look as though they belonged in a university, and there she is, there she was, she’s reached her goal—if only she could say what it was.

  But. Now.

  I’m pausing, not stopping. In a little while it all comes to a stop.

  But. Now.

  I
pause.

  Because.

  I PAUSE BECAUSE. A rhyme. I made another rhyme. Like a little child makes. Because. To tell you the truth, I’m feeling bad because to tell you the rest of what happened to her is so terrible. I might as well tell you what really happened at the football parking lot.

  No. See. I didn’t. I changed it a little. Because while I wanted you to know everything I made it a little prettier than it was. So. I’ll grit my teeth. And no more fibs, no lies I’ll tell you. For better. For worse. You won’t be shocked? Good. Because if you didn’t want to listen in the first place you would be out playing mahjong, or watching TV, or sitting alone drinking coffee, or talking with me or some other grandmother on the telephone, nu? Good. So you’re here. And you hear. And you see. Oi, don’t I wish I could see a little better like the old days. Here. Look. What happened after was not good with her, and what happened up there on the heights of the parking lot, oi, it was—this was it. I’ll say it.

  Here they are. In the car. Oi, another rhyme. I’m driving myself crazy with these rhymes. And you remember when he opens his pants and takes out—his tube? And he asks for one thing? Well, I lied. He didn’t ask for the one thing, he made her do the other. That’s right. Isn’t that terrible? The poor girl, you should have seen her. He held her head down, really rough, and he pushed her, pushed her, pushed her, and she didn’t know what she was doing, and she bit him a little, and with the knuckles of his hand he cuffs her on the ear, and this makes it still worse. I’m telling you, she’s crying, and he’s making sounds like a crazy man, and it was awful. And then she pulls away, and he’s sitting there with his head back, looking like he just took a drug, and then she jumps from the car, her blouse all mussed, the uniform skirt filthy, it’s like someone has spilled soup on her clothes, and she runs toward the woods at the end of the stadium, and she hears him start up the car behind her.

  But while she wants to run, she feels cramps and she has to stop, and she doubles over, and she retches, you know, she doubles over and wants to do it but nothing comes, nothing comes.