by Peter Orner
Walt looks at Sarah, his face drained of color, bleached, like a drowned child. Rhodas. How many thousand daughters reaching and that priest wasn’t even in the Civil Defense.
Sarah watches his stricken face, so close to hers, so familiar, so changing, withdrawing. His shoulders tremble. He’s holding a shoe. Afraid of what, Walt? What? You beautiful cowering man, already old in the eyes. You’ll die before I do and leave me in this house and the silence from the basement will kill me. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! You drunken whozits are waking the baby!
“Walt,” she says. “Hold still. Hunk of sleep in your eyes the size of China. Telling me I don’t know. Hold still.” Sarah fingers the yellow schmutz out of the edge of his eye with a nail. Then she pulls her finger down his cheek and lets go.
Melba Kuperschmid Returns
MELBA KUPERSCHMID was a beautiful one, and everybody knows what happens to the beautiful ones. Scooped up and gone before she turned twenty. He was a traveler; nobody even knew his name or what he did for a living, only that he had daring and never lived in one place for very long. But her old friend Sarah Kaplan used to get postcards from places that didn’t seem very romantic from the photographs. Windsor, Canada, for one. Hamilton, Ohio, for another. Then, twenty-three years after she left, as everybody claimed they knew in their heart of hearts would happen sooner or later, Melba Kuperschmid came home. Discarded like the beautiful ones always are, one way or another. But when she came back to Fall River, she wasn’t fat like everybody expected. She was still gorgeous. Still had all that hair and those enormous black eyes men fell into, flailing. Still Melba, not destroyed, even a little giggly, like she always was. Not lamenting being deserted, not even discussing it.
For a few months she went to cocktail parties and talked (politely) to the husbands, letting everybody know from the way she refused to laugh at the men’s bad jokes that she wanted no part of them. This of course made the wives suspicious. What else could a returned (spurned, vanquished) divorcee possibly want if not their potbellied husbands? The other curious thing was that not long after she came home (she had no family left, and she’d had no children) Melba—now in her mid-forties—opened a seamstress shop on Corky Row, apparently with her alimony money. She’d always been good at sewing, a lot of the girls remembered that. But Melba Kuperschmid? A dressmaker?
Sarah had always loved her. As girls they often left school in late morning and spent afternoons trudging the mud along Watuppa Pond. Slogging and cackling about people. They used to talk about what they’d do when they got to Paris. Twirl in the streets, first of all. Then search for dark, Mediterranean men with unpronounceable names and wispy, tuggable mustaches. For Sarah, Melba’s return was a strange jolt. She’d been marching forward. She’d raised Rhoda into a girl people talked about (Rhoda had been elected “most garrulous” and “best dancer” by her class at Durfee). Sarah had served as volunteer chair of the hospital charity luncheon eleven years in a row, and was a respected member (and past treasurer) of the Hebrew Ladies Helping Hand Society. The new house on Delcar wasn’t so new anymore, but the mortgage was far from dead and buried. There was Walt and his cars. He talked about his old junked cars as if they were children who’d grown up and gone away. Now he was in love with Volvos, which made him, according to him, avant-garde. Rhoda already in her fifth term at Smith the year Melba came home, 1961.
Was it really possible that Melba wanted nothing more than to open a shop and live quietly, modestly, in a rented apartment mid-hill? Sarah tried to distance herself from the gossip of the girls. There were all kinds of explanations. Dotty Packer said that some cousin of Leddy Levine (of the Harry Levines) told her that Melba’s ex-husband was a gambler who fled because he was wanted by J. Edgar Hoover and the Sugar House Gang for extortion and unpaid debts. Somebody else—Ruth Gerard—said Melba’s husband was a kind of junior-issue sheik who got summoned back to Arabia to marry a sultan’s first-born daughter. That was a good one. Ruth Gerard always came up with good ones, and Sarah chose not to add that she had in her possession an old photograph (Melba had sent it from the Midwest somewhere) of the man she married and he was white as white could be, bare-chested, leaning against a tree, wearing a bowler and a crimped smile that made him look like he was being pinched, but oh, was he handsome, very. The only thing Sarah would offer the gossip eaters was a lie she claimed she’d heard from Tenelle Donnatello (who was considered close to the new Melba because it was from her husband, Felix, that Melba rented shop space) that Melba had left him, not the other way around. This of course prompted Bea Halprin to huff, “Well, in that case, where’s her other man? And why come back here if life was so wonderful she could ditch him in the first place?”
The fact was that nobody knew because nobody asked. Even the most fearless nosey parker, Ellie Dondis, didn’t have the courage to broach the subject directly. Because there still floated about Melba a halo of untouchableness, an aura that went beyond her physical beauty into realms no one could describe in conversation. She’d had it since she was a child, and everybody recognized that it still shrouded her with as much force as ever. (For example, they all started wearing hats indoors again.) Yet since Melba was something of a shopkeeper now, it became a question of class. This didn’t bother Sarah, of all people, but it did, after a while, make it more awkward to invite her to cocktail parties, and eventually the girls stopped asking her to most gatherings, except the occasional low-profile non-charity luncheon. And when this didn’t appear to ruffle Melba’s feathers, some of the girls started saying, Maybe there’s something wrong upstairs. Didn’t something like this happen to Sylvia Zagwill’s brother Jerome, that one morning he just refused to get out of bed ever again? There was a lot of dispute on this point, because even those girls who stopped sending over invitations still took their dresses down to Melba to be fitted or let out. First, out of pity, they took things they no longer wore. Later they relied on her because she was so good they couldn’t live without her. Finally the consensus was that anybody that excellent with the needle (particularly after all these years) couldn’t possibly be crazy. But that didn’t make the socializing problem any easier for anybody.
About eight months into Melba’s return, Sarah parked the big Lincoln Town Car on the street in front of the house on Delcar. (Walt always insisted she drive his past loves; this elephant was so huge it didn’t fit in the garage.) But she didn’t get out of the car. Instead, she paused and reflected that she’d just spent a good chunk of her time at the market worrying over the mystery of Melba Kuperschmid: her lack of bitterness, her lack of interest in reclaiming any former glory. They had all been so jealous—she was the envy of a thousand girls—it must have been real. Now her coming home and not caring a lick threw everything into question. The way she used to walk the halls, as if stepping on puddles of air nobody else could see, the boys quivering and gnawing their collars. Sarah left the groceries in the car and went in the house to look for something that needed mending. Not finding anything, she went into Walt’s closet forest of white shirts and ripped the sleeve of one. Got back in the car, melting strawberry ice cream and all (this was in August), and headed down the hill to Corky Row. She found Melba behind the counter, alone, her back to the door, working the Singer, the clicking monotonous, feverish, loud enough for her not to hear Sarah open the chimeless door.
And Sarah stands mesmerized by the back of Melba’s head. Her hair is pulled back tight in a plait; its end rests on her shoulder. Sarah looks at the exquisite column that forms that familiar neck. If she could freeze a moment in time, she’d freeze this one, the one before Melba turns around and sees her, because it isn’t the new Melba she wants, it’s the old one, the one who left here looking for something better. To ask what it’s like to be so loved that rolling your tongue around your teeth’s enough to make men swoon and need cold water. And that still not enough for you. Melba, with your simple black hair and big eyes, still no breasts to boast to the Queen of Sheba about, and yet you’re Melba, aren’t you? A
ren’t you? You were two years ahead of me. And you used to whisper that you stole a pack of Mr. Jalbert’s cigarettes. Come on, Sare. We’re as good as gone! And that was all it ever took.
In the shop, pressing her handbag and the shirt to her chest, listening to the manic click of the machine, watching Melba’s head. Maybe Sarah will tell her again (she wrote her about it after, in a flurry, and sent the letter to one of the many addresses she had for Melba then) about her own escape from Fall River. She’s sure Melba’s forgotten, if the letter even made it to her. And of course it was only for a weekend, but there was Sarah Gottlieb’s famous eloping to Rhode Island. People still talk about how Rhoda was born big and healthy barely seven scandalous months later, and how her mother’s rage lasted till the day she died. Didn’t Sarah take her risk, too? She never thought it would matter again (she was just like so many other people now), but now her once running means more.
She clears her throat. “Melba dear, I thought I’d drop by and bring you—”
Melba swivels her stool. Slivery wrinkles below her eyes like veins in a leaf the only change. It could be 1936. They could be on the shore of Watuppa talking about Howie or Hughie, the one from Boston who chased Melba for months, one of the many she didn’t choose, the one who kept circling her block in his convertible, hundreds of times a day. They called them Howie’s laps, and they became as much a part of the neighborhood as Mrs. Gilda Rubover’s garden of rabbit skeletons.
Yes, the same as ever, but tired now, too. Maybe it’s the sallow light of the store, but there’s exhaustion in that still-beautiful face. Melba’s eyes linger before she welcomes Sarah with her old closed-mouthed smirk. It’s in the way the sweat’s pooled in the notch of her upper lip, a glimpse of what’s disappeared in that trickle of moment before Melba calls, sprightly, over the noise of the machine, “Ah, Sarah.”
And Sarah looks at her and thinks, We’re becoming older women, on the verge of turning into those fat-ankled waddlers at the club, the ones that Walt says keep disappearing into their shoes. Even you.
Melba waves her closer. “Sit! Sit!” The shop is cluttered and stuffy. Fabric is stacked in piles on the floor. Skirts clipped on hangers are draped over ironing boards. Measuring tape’s in a heap. There are books on a shelf alongside a pile of sewing magazines. There’s a bowl of chocolate and a ripped calendar. A cat. Even you, Melba. You can’t hide behind not caring.
Melba tosses a pincushion away, wipes off a wooden school chair with a rag. “Sit! Sit! For God’s sake, sit down, Sarah.” She sighs. “So good to see you. Too too long. I haven’t laid eyes on you in weeks, ages, honey.”
Sarah sits on the edge of the chair to make clear she can’t stay long, that she’s only pausing for a quick chat. She tells about the shirt, what a klutz Walt is, how he insists on wearing his good clothes around the house to fix things that don’t need fixing. Yet even as she rambles on, she becomes aware of something in the way Melba said “weeks, ages.” As if they aren’t different. As if they could just as easily be the same, for all she needs or cares. And then Sarah knows, all at once, what should have been the obvious truth all along: that the marriage was short-lived, that the husband probably didn’t last a year or two after that shirtless picture by the tree, that it was Melba who did all the moving around, that she’d been alone, that she’d been a seamstress for the last twenty-odd years, a damn good one, and that she came home for the same reason everybody comes home, but that in her case it wasn’t to chase her past; she merely wanted to live near it. That proximity itself was comfort.
That she’d been alone, probably many years alone, maybe even because she wanted to be. Sarah thinks of Walt, how often during the day she forgets all about him, but still he arrives every afternoon, breathing heavy at the back stoop, arms full of more junk they’d never need; he arrives, always, some afternoons knocking on the door with his head because he’s got no free hand. And yes, she feels pity, but Sarah’s first instinct is to rub Melba’s unchanged face in everything she doesn’t have, to unbuckle her handbag and wave pictures of Rhoda. Rhoda’s report cards, her hundred boyfriends, her Honor Society pins, her still-life drawings of fruit and vegetables…
They make small talk about the shop and some things Melba’s working on. She’s doing Nina Shetzer’s daughter’s wedding party. (An absolutely horrid plum! The bridesmaids are going to look like the walking wounded.) But after a couple of awkward, too-long silences, Sarah can’t keep herself from blurting, “I hate myself for saying this, Melba, but the girls all talk about your life like it’s a train wreck.”
Melba laughs and swoops her arm in an arc to damn them all, every last one of them, to hell. And what’s incredible is that even her voice is the same, thick and direct like a man’s, like the rocks she used to fling into the Watuppa. “Tell them I was never a whore. Tell those yappies that.”
Sarah doesn’t nod, only stares back at her and seeks forgiveness from Melba’s eyes for the curse of being no better than everybody else, for reveling in such a miraculous and perfect failure. She thinks of the early postcards, the black-and-white photographs, Melba’s zigzagged scrawl: Darling Sarah, We’ve moved to a place called Wabash in Indiana. We live in a house on a small hill overlooking a dirty rushing river. Reminds me a bit of home, but the rivers are so much smaller here. Please write! I don’t know two souls here. Your M
“Not one of them ever once called you that. Not one.”
But Melba’s still laughing at the thought and doesn’t care if they did or they didn’t. She scoots her stool closer, leans, and squeezes Sarah’s wrists. Her palms are hot and wet from work.
Birth of a Son-in-Law
AND THEIR DAUGHTER married Arthur Mendlebaum. The wedding was at Beth El in Fall River, and Walt and Sarah Kaplan were dressed to the nines, beaming. Sarah directing traffic, Walt telling jokes he either read in a book or stole from Alf Dolinsky. Rhoda one enormous smile in white—though to Sarah’s horror she’d pinned up her train at the last moment. Arthur’s family, cranky rich Rhode Islanders who looked down their noses at Fall River, at the musty temple, at the murmuring rabbi in his soup-stained jacket. At the Kaplan relatives and their Russian accents, at Walt’s made-up Yiddish that was really pigeon Portuguese he’d picked up from stock boys at his store. But Arthur himself was a peach, a good old boy who could pal around with Walt until Walt exhausted himself with stories. Sarah said Walt loved Arthur more than Rhoda, if only because Arthur was the first person in Fall River history who’d never once yawned in his face, said she’d be happy if they’d have him down to New York to take the load off her ears once in a while. Of course, this was bull; at home, with nobody around, it was Sarah’s yap that drilled his ears and Walt who’d hunker in his study with his maps and atlases. But talk is talk at a wedding, and Walt said, “Anytime I’m invited I’ll come down there and bore Arthur to so many tears he’ll sleep in his office to escape me.” And Arthur said, “For God’s sake, Walt, you’re the least dullest guy from here to Worcester” (pronouncing it Worster), and everybody yucked as if he was the next greatest Jewish comic. Sarah laughed loudest, her patented guffaw, her whale honk. Arthur was taller than any Jew she’d ever known, much less been related to. He laughed because he liked to laugh. He pinched Rhoda when he thought nobody was looking. He looked at other girls when he thought nobody was looking. He was a healthy strapper who was going to be rich! Didn’t everybody know he had a job working on the Stock Exchange in New York? Rich, rich, rich, rich, rich. Arthur is going to be rich and Rhoda is going to have babies and speak French to them. Why Rhoda went around speaking that French, Sarah had not an iota of an idea (though it was true that she often told her friends, “Well, you know, Rhoda is truly a genius at the French language”). All she really knew was that her daughter was going to have a house in the suburbs of New York, a real house with more than two trees and more than one bathroom. In a place called Rye Bread, Walt insisted on calling it. My daughter is leaving a city named after the mighty confluence of two rivers
for a place named after a sandwich. But Rhoda said no, it was only called Rye. Rye, New York. A place with shaggy trees, wide boulevards, no dead mills (our rat hotels, Walt calls them)—a place with no jobs, only houses and trains. Trains to take men in hats to work in the city and trains to take them home.
The reception is in the basement of Walt’s Elk Lodge. The two of them stand in front of the empty trophy case, watching. Walt elbows her. “Want another hot dog on a stick?”
“Yes.”
“Another glass of champagne?”
“Yes.”
“Kiss on the kissa?”
And Walt, hot dog–mouthed, kisses her and the people dance and her daughter floats by whispering elegant nonsense, and even the Elk’s cheap chandelier is high-class. They’ve killed Kennedy and we might be in a new war. Nobody seems to know for sure except Walt, who says, “Absolutely we are, don’t let anybody fool you, it’s war.” Either way, all that counts is that Arthur’s got two bum knees and glasses thick as dictionaries. Walt says they can’t make him go anywhere. Rhoda’s got the best figure of any girl here, even better than Dotty Packer’s niece, the one marrying that hoodlum from Swansea. Walt chomps another hot dog on a stick, holds up the stick, and looks at it. “I could have invented this. I’d have bought you an island with the money.”