Anna in the Afterlife

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Anna’s Archive

  IN THE DRIVEWAY of Carol’s house, conveniently situated catty-corner from Janet’s, Anna watched her daughters disposing ruthlessly of her precious papers. Sitting in plastic garden chairs, they examined then flung these scraps of paper and notebooks and folders and flyers, her carefully collected medical bills, her filled calendars, lists of all the drugs she had ever taken, notes from all her classes, records of every phone call to people who had cheated her, a card file of all her customers from the antique store, her jury duty summonses, these and other precious notations they dumped—without ceremony—into a huge green plastic garbage can.

  She felt it was premature for them to be doing this when their mother was not yet even warm in her grave. (Warmer, at least, than her remains were now in the mortuary refrigerator.) Not that Anna expected her children to lug her material leavings with them for the rest of their lives, but this seemed a precipitous rush to get rid of her, bag and baggage. Yet she understood her delayed burial presented many difficult hours for them to get through and this activity might be—in their view—an appropriate act of remembrance and devotion.

  “Hold on a minute, my God, what is this?” Carol exclaimed, pulling out of a carton the moldy remains of Anna’s brown corduroy jacket. Black pellets fell from it onto the cement of the driveway. “Rat droppings! Yuck!” Carol jumped up and flung the jacket away from her. “Now we’ll probably catch the hanta virus. It lives forever in rat droppings—then the droppings dry into a powder, and you breathe it in and you die.”

  “So I guess then we won’t be separated from Mom too long,” Janet said. “We can just follow her lead and join her in the afterlife.”

  “I’m not in such a hurry,” Carol said. “Are you? Wait here a minute and don’t touch anything. I’ll be right back.” She went into the garage. Anna noticed a breeze blowing, warm for January. In fact, it was like a picnic out in the driveway—tree branches sighing, birds chirping, the sky bright and blue overhead.

  Nature was not actually so bad. Anna couldn’t understand why she had shunned it all her ninety years—never bothered to admire a sunrise, a lowering sky, the buds of spring, the chirp of baby birds. Probably because such matters were mindless. Anna had no patience for lack of thought, for slowness (what was slower than the growing of a tree from some kind of nut?), for repetition without purpose. Whereas in Chopin, in Mozart, if a theme were repeated and moved steadily through a sonata in varying patterns, it was there to bring the listener’s heart to life, to bring someone musical (like herself) to her knees with its beauty and design.

  Now Carol came back looking like an alien from outer space. She had a painter’s mask over her mouth and nose and huge yellow rubber gloves on her hands. She handed a duplicate set to Janet. “Put these on. We’re not breathing in hanta virus if we can help it. If I died and my sons inherited this house, they’d sell it and blow it all in two months.”

  So Anna’s daughters went back to work shuffling through the miniscule record of their mother’s life: her written remains, mere scraps of paper, lined notebook pages with meaningless lists, business cards of others, IRS tax returns, canceled checks. Where were her great creative works? Her opus? Her poetry, her musical compositions, her art? What petty remains were left of her were going into a cracked garbage can—and those sending them there were the only substantial creations of her life: her children.

  Not enough, not enough, Anna concluded. Thirty or forty years hence her girls would be in the grave as well, and where would Anna be found? In the shape of the thumb of one of her grandchildren? In their inherited bunions? Even her renditions of “White Christmas” on the piano, performances that Abram recorded on plastic records back in Brooklyn in the ‘40s, were long crumbled and devoured by time. Maybe a few of her pieces were on those cassette tapes that Janet’s husband, Danny, liked to make at family events. But it was little enough to show for a lifetime. Anna recalled how, as a little girl, she used to play make-believe piano on the edge of the wooden kitchen table in her parents’ apartment in the lower east side of New York till one day her father gave in and bought her an old upright piano. Where did her longing come from? Her father’s love of Caruso? Some distant rabbinical scribe, some cantor in the old country? She had never wasted time on these sorts of questions and wasn’t going to now. Music was Anna’s passion, and she knew she’d had it in her to be a great musician.

  “Remember how Mom used to carry her music to the eye doctor’s office? The way she would say, ‘My glaucoma is so bad! I can’t read my Mozart! I can’t read my Chopin!’ “Carol was looking with disgust at the pile of Anna’s music notebooks in her lap.

  “Of course I remember,” Janet said.

  “Weren’t you embarrassed to death, the way she made such a fuss? As if, since she played music, she was more entitled not to go blind than the other old ladies who only watched soap operas?”

  “She always needed to prove she was special,” Janet said.

  “Because she wasn’t special,” Carol said. “Look at this!”

  She was holding, Anna could see, the bulletin from the Hollywood Senior Multipurpose Center.

  “Volunteer of the Month: Anna Goldman,” Carol read aloud. “Listen to this information she gave them: ‘Anna Goldman was born in New York and lived there until her family moved to Florida and later to California. She has two daughters of whom she is justly proud. The elder daughter is a writer and teacher of international fame, and the younger is talented and celebrated in art and sculpture. Both are married and have families.”

  “Notice she doesn’t say that one of her daughter’s husbands was a wife batterer, and killed himself. Notice how she inflates your ‘international fame’ and my ‘art genius.’ She always used to say, when the three of us were together: ‘Here we are, the musician, the writer, and the artist.’ We were three invisible nobodies, Janet, that’s what we were.”

  “If it made her feel worthwhile to brag about us, why should you have minded so much? We didn’t turn out so bad.”

  “Well, if you think you’re that special, you have the same problem Mom had. She had to be in the limelight. She had to puff us up because we were really never good enough for her. I always minded! I was always so ashamed of her.”

  Anna felt a pang in whatever portion of her being was still extant. She had always believed her children thought as much of her as she did of herself. Maybe more, since she had the added power of being their mother.

  “Throw it all out,” Carol continued. “Don’t even read that stuff in her folders or her notebooks. Our mother was a hollow lady, Janet. I don’t even know if she loved us. Maybe she only loved herself.”

  A hollow lady! Sharper than a serpent’s tooth! But could it be true she loved no one but herself? Maybe not even herself?

  There, in the balmy air of the driveway, Carol and Janet were having a tug-of-war. Carol was trying to pull a bunch of notebooks out of Janet’s lap and toss them in the trash. “One second, don’t do that!” Janet was pleading. “These are Mom’s notes from her music class. I just want to look at them.”

  “Don’t waste your time. Mom was just a parrot. Listen to this…” she said, leaning over Janet’s shoulder and reading: “‘Baroque Period, 1600-1750, Bach died in 1750 and Handel stopped writing in 1750—hit by blindness. Handel lived in England. Bach lived in Germany.‘ Her notes are totally mechanical. She never had an original thought.”

  “Where is all this anger coming from so suddenly?” Janet asked her sister. “I think you’re just tired and stressed out. We’ve been stretched pretty thin these last few days. Maybe we need to take a break. Have a cup of tea. I just can’t imagine what Mom did to you to make you this angry.”

  “It’s what she didn’t do! She never knew what I needed! I wanted nice clothes, and she bought me junk on sale that I looked awful in. I wanted to wear my hair long, and she made me cut it short with little bangs. She never knew who I was! She never thought of me as a person with needs. She w
asn’t sensitive to anything I needed.”

  “And would you say we did better with our children?” Janet asked. “Were we so sensitive?”

  “We did better than Mom did. At least I tried to hear what my kids were saying. Mom didn’t listen to anyone. I don’t even know if she had any sense of the kind of man Daddy was. I don’t even know if she loved him.”

  Anna felt unduly stirred by these accusations, unfairly attacked since she no longer could defend herself. Her girls glared at one another. She knew, from her own troubles with high blood pressure, that their systolic readings had to be up in the danger range. She hoped one of them wouldn’t have a stroke and then they’d have to cancel Anna’s funeral.

  Janet had wrested one of the notebooks from Carol and was reading something in it, a big blue faded loose-leaf. Carol turned away and continued dumping papers into the garbage can, mumbling under her breath. “Why did she save all this junk? All her complaint letters, this one to Campbell’s soup: ‘There aren’t enough noodles in your chicken noodle soup!’ To Van De Kamp’s bakery: ‘I found a bran muffin in your box of chocolate cupcakes.’ To the police department: ‘I had gone out to do my civic duty and vote, and what did I get but a parking ticket!’ All that energy wasted. All that misplaced indignation. And these nonsense jingles she wrote to every stranger she met, to kiss up and curry favor. Listen to this one:

  To Evelyn and Joe, (whoever on earth they were…):

  Here’s a heartfelt double tribute

  That I’d fondly like to state

  One-half goes to Evelyn

  The other to Joe, her mate.

  They’re a very special couple

  Who aim to please us all

  They sing, they dance, they have a talent

  It’s almost ten feet tall…

  When the news is grim and papers shout

  Of recession, uneasy peace, and fright

  These two just turn the tide and say

  ‘Everything’s all right…’

  And since this is their birthday month

  Evelyn’s the twelfth and Joe September three

  We wish them forever good health and cheer

  From you and you and ME!”

  Carol put her finger down her throat. “Shall I throw up here or in the bushes?”

  “Have a heart. She just did it for fun. It was almost a reflex of hers, to put everything into rhyme. But here’s something different,” Janet said, in a different tone of voice, looking down at a sheet in her lap. “Come here and look, Carol. Here’s something that isn’t a complaint letter or a nonsense jingle.”

  Carol came and leaned over Janet’s back to see what it was. She squinted in the sun, shading her eyes.

  “Read it to me, I can’t focus out here…it’s too bright.”

  “She wrote this among her notes from the music class at UCLA. It’s dated November 1, 1967. That was Daddy’s birthday, two years after he died. This page has notations from a lecture on Debussy and Chopin. But listen to what Mom wrote on the edge of the page:

  The cool damp earth the cake,

  Each candle a star

  Peaceful birthday my darling

  Wherever you are.”

  Carol and Janet looked at one another.

  “Mom wrote a real poem,” Janet said. “She wrote Daddy a love poem.”

  “So you believe she really loved Daddy after all?”

  “I think it proves we’re children of a love match,” Janet smiled. “You and I, we’re love children.”

  “Alright, so we’ll keep this one piece of paper, even the whole notebook,” Carol conceded. “Maybe we could even make copies of this poem for our children.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to put the original in a frame and hang it on the wall.”

  “Good, you keep it. And I’ll come every day to your house to visit it,” Carol said.

  Late that night, Janet came outside to her front yard to call her cat. It seemed to Anna that a moonbeam was illuminating the row of trash cans at the curb near Carol’s house. The cracked green garbage can, the can without a cover, was filled to overflowing with Anna’s papers, the edges of envelopes and the tips of folders like so many glistening points of a crown glowing in the strange, hushed light of the moon. Anna watched her daughter pause and stare at the can, take a few steps toward her own front door and turn and look again. Anna could see what her daughter saw, how the moon was a spotlight on her earthly remnants, the darkness like a stage from which actors were calling out all her written words.

  Janet went quickly back into her house and came out immediately holding a large yellow plastic bag. She rushed across the street to where Anna’s trash heap shone in the moonlight. Working fast, she grabbed handfuls of her mother’s papers and transferred them to the bag, stuffing them down till they were compressed, then adding others. She was bent halfway into the garbage can when a police car cruised by and slowed to a stop. Janet straightened up and waved at the officers: they waved back, no questions asked. Anna—because she had helped her daughters with the down payments on their homes—was glad to be responsible for the fact that they lived in one of the safest towns in America.

  An owl hooted and the chilling cry of a coyote spun upward from the distant hills while Anna’s daughter, intent on her mission, went on rescuing from the garbage the treasures of Anna’s archive.

  Anna felt revived by the night wind. She could still know relief and its attendant pleasures. Now all her words would be preserved, and a good thing it was—for her descendants, her heirs, and for the nourishment of posterity.

  The Blood Bath

  IF ANNA HAD KNOWN EARLIER how badly her sister Gert had taken advantage of Anna’s daughters when she tried to commit suicide, she would have risen up from her bed and murdered Gert herself.

  Now that Anna was in limbo, between dead and buried, she found she could slide up and down the pole of history to explore certain secrets about which she’d never quite had the whole story. This was an advantage of daunting latitude—she could go anywhere in time and see what had previously been kept from her.

  When she was still alive, but half dead in the nursing home, she’d been very suspicious when she learned of Gert’s suicide attempt and the way her girls had mumbled over the details—(“We think she probably took too many sleeping pills”)—and changed the subject. Anna knew something was amiss there and that her girls had somehow been more involved than they were telling her. If Gert had wanted children to get mixed up in her craziness, she should have had some of her own.

  From the very beginning Gert had wanted to steal Anna’s babies. On the first day Anna had brought Janet home from the hospital in Brooklyn, her sister tried to take over, elbow her out of the way, block Anna’s access to the crib (where Gert would sit for hours, staring at the baby’s little curled fists, stroking the thin blonde fuzz on her delicate head). She complained about the way Anna bathed the baby although Anna had professional instructions for this, left in writing by the visiting nurse: “Hold the point of towel under the chin, lift baby from bathinette, hold tight if baby is slippery, fold left side of towel to the right, then right side of towel to the left. Drop the point on baby’s head but do not drop baby.”

  Gert thought she knew better about everything. She criticized Anna for waking Janet from a peaceful sleep at six A.M. to give her orange juice, though the doctor advised that a rigorous schedule was important for discipline. Anna let the baby cry for the same reason, but Gert was always rushing to the crib, cooing and rocking and singing and baby talking in a way that made Anna nauseated.

  Still, it was Anna’s baby, not Gert’s, and Abram was Anna’s husband, not Gert’s, and all Gert had was her smelly dog Bingo who was forever scraping her rear end along the carpet and making Anna sick. One day when Gert wasn’t home, Anna had no choice but to call the pound and give away the dog. Male dogs were coming to the front yard and peeing all over the baby’s carriage because they smelled Bingo, who seemed to be in heat every oth
er day.

  The timing wasn’t kind, but Bingo had to be removed when Gert wasn’t at home or she’d have kicked up a fuss to high heaven. The dog was just a dog. Gert simply couldn’t understand that a baby was more important. When she came home and found Bingo gone, not only gone but dispatched to dog heaven, she told Anna she’d never forgive her. Then she pretended to have something like a nervous breakdown for a few weeks and lost weight and cried in her room.

  Anna, in her new freedom as a dead woman and with time to spare, felt called upon to investigate the nervy suicide attempt that had to be Gert’s ultimate ploy to seduce her children. Anna herself never played games about ending her life; she had said she wanted to die, said it up front in the nursing home every day. And when she tried to do it by wedging herself between the piano and the wall in the chapel, she certainly wasn’t asking for attention. It was just her bad luck they got her out.

  But Gert: if she could have, she would have done it on national television. On the day she picked, Janet had just cleared the dishes from Danny’s breakfast (she was one of those women who still cooked for their men) and was packing him a lunch when the phone rang.

  “Janet…” It was Gert. Janet took a deep breath. Exasperation was on her face; this wasn’t a good time for her to talk, it was too early in the day, she had a hundred things to do in the morning. Did Gert care how often she interrupted the girls’ lives? Sometimes she called Anna’s daughters four times a day—a woman with all the time in the world. Her second husband, Harry, had died four years before, and now she lived in a fancy Beverly Hills retirement home.

  “Janet,” she said. “I decided I don’t want to live anymore.”

  “I know how you feel. I know it’s hard to be old, Aunt Gert,” Janet said kindly if a little impatiently. “But what can you do about it?”

  “I already did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “I slit my wrists. Don’t call anyone…”

  “You slit your wrists? When?”