by Peter Orner
He’s due at work, but after what he’s seen? Over the phone yesterday Leon said, “Why torture yourself? Get out of town for the day. Take Sarah to Boston. Buy her a steak at Jimmy’s. Enjoy yourself half a day in your life. It’s over, over.”
Before his brother left, as the two of them were clearing out the last of the inventory and adjusting the books, Walt had snarled, “What kind of person moves to Florida to live?”
“Is that a question?”
“Enlighten me, grace me.”
And Leon had sat in their father’s ancient swivel chair and raised his legs and whirled the way they used to when they were stock boys. Cause it’s warm. Cause Bets loves it there. Cause her sisters live there, even though she hates them. Cause we’ve got the apartment in Fort Myers paid for. Cause they’re driving the goddamned autobahn through our store. Because this town’s not through dying. Cause I put a little money away. Unlike you. Cause it’s warm.
Not going back to the peephole today, because having to listen to that Morris would only drive the stake deeper. Cousin Morris, so kind to give you a job, Sarah says. You know he can’t afford to go around giving handouts. How can you complain when it’s honest work? And Walt saying, You don’t understand, it’s just talking. Moving money around. Not the kind of work I’m used to. Honest work, she says, as if his thirty-seven years of selling furniture was stealing from people.
Still listening to the crushing, preposterous warlike barrage, he walks down Third Avenue (avoiding South Main, where there’s a hole where his store used to be) and across Rock Street. Then up Union Avenue. Halfway up the hill, the clamor becomes mercifully more faint, as though the tired clapboards are soaking up the sound. Christ Almighty, I’ll stomp to Kansas City. Pains everywhere, but legs like tree stumps. He leans into the hill and marches. He salutes an old salty out on her porch, and she fumbles with her glasses and smiles. The decrepits always went for him. He could sell a newfangled recliner with all the bells and whistles to a crocker on her last legs. Die with your feet up, my royal lady, and don’t forget we now also carry Congoleum Rugs and Gruno Refrigerators. He marches on. Prices so low, your conscience will bother you. He knows every tree stump, every graffitied initial. Knows who laid the cement for the sidewalk without looking down and reading the patinaed bronze plaque: O’CONNOR AND ANGELL, CONTRACTORS, FALL RIVER, 1893.
And he reaches 100 Delcar, and he’s home but not home. Sarah can’t see him, or there’d be all kinds of shrieking. What kind of man’s not at work at 2:30 in the afternoon on a Monday? He creeps around back and hides behind the boulder. Collapses faceup on the grass. He can hardly keep up with his own breathing as the damp seeps through his pants. The kitchen window’s open. The pooh-bah’s on the telephone. He feels the rock against his head. He sees the ball’s slow hover and Sarah’s plump fingers twisting the phone cord. Sees his brother spinning around in a chair in a room that no longer exists—and still Sarah talks. Our whole caboodle’s getting bashed to hell, and it’s caving, yes caving. But my scrumptious porkette’s big mouth’s keeping talking. “I didn’t tell her casserole was a bad idea, only that it might be wrong for the occasion, and Lorraine says why am I meddling in the food, and I said I’m overall chairman, and she says then why don’t you worry about being chairman, and I said that’s what I’m doing, worrying, and she says well, don’t worry, and I said well, which is it, worry or don’t worry?” He sinks further into the wet ground, loving her. He wants to climb in through the window and prance her around the kitchen bellowing like a lunatic, drag her upstairs, pull the shades, bite off her buttons, let the phone ring till it kills itself. And laugh, laugh. But he’s a stowaway in his own yard, and also, much as he tries, much as he needs the rescue of it, he can’t turn his quickened breathing into anything other than an old man’s gasps.
High Priest at the Gates
WALT USED TO STAND outside the cemetery gates and smoke, because under some ancient law from the Talmud that he happily took advantage of, but never fully understood, he wasn’t permitted to enter cemeteries, because he, Walt Kaplan, was a Kohen, a genuine descendant of high Hebrew priests. Of course he got a bang out of being royalty. He used to go around sometimes licking his finger and anointing people duke of this, duchy of that, even called Alf Dolinsky “my liege.” When Dolinsky said that’s not Hebrew, Walt said even the pope doesn’t preach to his flock in Latin anymore. “Benevolent eminences like myself have to change with the times.” Once, during Sarah’s Aunt Ida’s graveside service—Ida was so old for so long that most people forgot she hadn’t died yet and were genuinely shocked when it happened—Walt put on one of those Burger King crowns and greeted people after the service with a gloved hand and a blessing, till Sarah whispered that if he didn’t take that thing off in two seconds she’d rip his head off. But it was also out there with his pack of Kools, in front of the gates, across the street from the gas station, that Walt would ruminate on all the time he was going to have to spend inside the gates, among those graves, inside a cheap casket from Gould’s. His status as a member of the Kohanim applied only to his living flesh; dead he was the same gone schlump as everybody else. And even on the day Ida was disappearing into that irregularly mowed grass forever (he could hear Rabbi Gruber intone his stock line: “We shall always remember the cheerful countenance of the deceased”), he couldn’t help comparing the time we spend there, and working the whole thing out in his head for the nine millionth time and thinking again: Nasty joke. Here’s your body. Now watch it die. Watching the crowd of mourners through the gates and wanting to shout that they all had it backward. Clowns, it’s us, the ones still paying taxes, who need some honoring. It’s the lucky stiffs in the ground—Ab Sisson, Teddy Marcowitz, Pearl Brodsky, Lou Jacobs, Hyman Sobiloff, and now even poor Ida—who should show more respect. They’re the ones who should be huddled and bundled and murmuring and remembering. They’re the ones who should be blowing snot in their hands. All Ida and the rest of the sleepers deserve is a handshake goodbye, maybe a peck on the cheek farewell, because for them it’s a simple matter of going away, of leaving, of forgetting keys, wallet, driver’s license, cash—an easy vamoose. You want sorrow? Out here! He wants to roar it at the backs of the mourners. Turn around! Out here beyond the gates, suckers! Turn around!
In the Dark
IN THE DARK she lights a match. She looks at herself in the reflection in the window. The flame is jumpy and fickle because she’s breathing on it. Yet it stays lit until it burns down to her fingers, and she watches herself in the uncertain light and sees a face too large and blanched, like an unwelcome moon. The house so still and mute even the kitchen clock’s terrible grinding is muffled. She’s downstairs in the new room, the TV room, the room they remodeled in the fifties. Walt’s upstairs muttering snores like a sea cow. It’s two o’clock in the morning and she whispers something even she can barely hear: “What for?” What her mother used to say, first thing she ever said in the mornings, even before her father got sick, as though asking it of God. “What for? You tell me what for?” Her mother who died of grief for a daughter who only ran away down the block. But why now? Why Sarah asking? She thinks of Rhoda’s tiny munching lips at her nipples, remembers those grabby little hands—in this very room—all that need. And now? It isn’t that. She doesn’t want that need back. It’s some other more undefined ache. Something else, like being haunted by the dying light of the match, by her love, by her desire even now to knead Walt’s skin, even now to whisper in his sleeping ear—what?—that she’s here, that Sarah’s here, whisper, I’m here, I’m here. Because so much is occurring to her tonight and she can’t sleep while the house drowses. Sarah lets the silence soak her into its blur, as if she were descending slowly through water. But she’s never in her life been capable of whispering, of capturing a windless moment, and she fears he doesn’t know this about her, that she can simply sit, in the dark, the radio off, and can, yes, can, consider that her life with him has been exactly that, a life, and life’s not somethin
g you measure in good or bad. Her life with Walt a life—and if she could simply say—but that’s not it either. He wouldn’t want to hear about it, would shrug her away. “Whatayou talkin? Sarah? Whatayou talkin?” No, she would like to do it with a look that doesn’t need explanation or interpretation, but instead would simply make him remember. He’s such a writer down of things, such a clutcher of nonsense; the man has files of pictures of furniture, of tables and chairs he sold thirty years ago, stuff already on a dump heap—but there are so many things he doesn’t remember, because he never thought about them when they were happening. A year and a half ago now his brother Leon died in her arms because his wife, Bets, couldn’t bear it any longer, and when Walt came into that white room he didn’t look at his brother. He looked at Sarah—pleaded with her, as if she were suddenly the God with answers her mother was always talking to—and he doesn’t remember, because he wasn’t there when it was happening, and even now, when he rambles on about himself and Leon making illegal whiskey in a cowshed—as if Fall River ever had a cowshed in the past hundred years, as if he ever drank illegal whiskey—it’s so he won’t remember anything he really remembers about a brother dying before him. Love, isn’t it enough to describe? What for? Remember you holding me and me holding your dead brother and your eyes searching mine for some answer and me giving the only answer I knew how to give, which was to grip both of you, the living and the dead, and then, yes—you won’t remember this because you weren’t there when it was happening. I dropped him on the pillow and gripped you harder, and you dug your head into the nook of my shoulder and you wept no. Your brother who died too young because he went to Florida, state full of nothing but oranges and corpses; the man should have known, you said—I dropped him on the bed and gripped you and you wept no and you’ll never remember.
Atlantic City
SARAH COMES HOME for lunch after her volunteer shift at the register in the hospital gift shop and finds Walt dead on the floor of their bedroom. He has been dead for at least two hours. His second and last heart attack, and from this one there was no turning back. The man turned fifty-nine only three months ago. This is September 1975. It has been a long morning, Friday mornings always are, and Sarah’s feet hurt. She kneels beside his body and lifts his wrist to check for his pulse, even though she knows from looking at him. She knows. The way she knows it’s morning through the thick drapes of a strange hotel room. The way she knows it’s bad news by the way the phone rings mid-ring. Walt is dead. He is too young. He is dead. He is on his back with his suit pants on, sprawled, as though he went with fight. He clutches his wallet in his left hand. His teeth are still good and white. His shoes are polished. His tie is crooked, but tight and confident up to his big Adam’s apple. He could be a toppled wax statue. He’s wearing his watch. His hands are not clammy. He’s wet himself. But still, he could be sleeping on the floor. He could be napping. He could have fallen, tripped, knocked his head against the telephone table and conked himself out. She rests an ear on his chest, not to listen for any movement of his dead exploded heart, but because she is suddenly so weary and he has been her fat pillow all these years. Though she doesn’t want to sleep. She wants to rest awake. She sits up and takes off her shoes, then settles her head on his chest again, on his blue sea horses tie, on his sprawl. It isn’t comfortable because of the angle, but she doesn’t adjust. She remains still and listens to her own breathing. A bit quickened, but not hysterical, nothing even close to that. Other women, she thinks, would get hysterical. Run around moaning, dial telephone numbers furiously, shriek. The fools, she thinks, showy fools. Dingbats, Walt would call them. Dingbat chickens bawk-bawking. Walt, she thinks, too many sirloins at the Magoni’s in Somerset. How many Howard Johnson hot dogs on a buttered bun? Ate, ate, ate like a happy hog across your life, and now I’m here. I could murder your head. You want to see tears? You want them to drop on your shirt so you can feel them on your skin? Didn’t I tell you that time in Atlantic City that you waddled like an old man, that you needed to rest too much. You couldn’t walk the boardwalk without getting so tired, and now look at you, Walt, can’t even make it to work. That time in Atlantic City you laughed at me and said who the hell needs walking anyway. Bought us both another double cone. Pounded your chest and said, You got to live while you live. And that was all well and good for you. You don’t have to come home to you like this. I have to come home to you. Walt. Atlantic City. Why Atlantic City now? That time in Atlantic City with Bernie and Nina Sadow. You on the beach. The only one of us who’d swim. Bernie had some kind of skin condition. Who knew with that man. It was always something. And God, that Nina. Didn’t stop talking to take a breath the three days we were down there. About what? You said you never heard so much nonsense since Saul Graboys talked you into buying his lemon El Dorado. But you swam, darling. Bernie with his skin condition and his chain of what? Check-cashing stores? Wasn’t that it? Didn’t Bernie Sadow own a chain of check-cashing stores in Newark? What a business to be in, no wonder he had a skin condition. You splashing and shouting at us. I stayed on the beach because I couldn’t escape Nina’s mouth. Bernie sitting there bundled up like it was February in Warsaw, and you, my fat brave knight, my tub-a-lard warrior, in the water splashing, throwing a tennis ball to those shouting boys. Those boys leaping out of the water like pale white porpoises. You swam with those boys. Why Atlantic City now? We haven’t spoken to Bernie and Nina Sadow in how many years? You came back and shook your hair at us girls and said to Nina, Stop jabbering, woman. Stop! Come on, deadbeats, it’s the Fourth of July in Atlantic City! Nina wanted to go back to the hotel and play cards. Bernie didn’t want to do anything but tell strangers on the beach about all his ailments, that straw hat pulled down to his eyes, that huge coat, those big sunglasses. You said he looked like your Russian great-aunt escaped from the shtetl, Aunt Portia Bertobobovitch. At least that got a smile out of Bernie, but Nina barely heard it over her own blather, except to say to me, Oh, your Walt’s so hysterical. He’s really got to be the most hysterical of all the husbands. Of all the husbands, she said, and for once, even though she went right back to complaining about the food at the hotel, for once that blathering woman had an ounce of wisdom. You said, Bernie, my big Polish babushka. And Bernie said, I thought you said I was Russian. Because Bernie had a sense of humor, which was more than you could say for Nina. And you said, Poland, Russia, it all looks the same to a Jew on the run, and Bernie, who was sensitive and serious on that point, didn’t laugh, only said, Indeed. And later in the hotel you stood up on the bed with Q-tips sticking out your ears and mimicked Bernie’s indeed. Indeed, indeed, indeed—who does he think he is, the queen’s mother? Because Bernie was always finding new ways to remind people that he went to Harvard. But check cashing? Harvard College, Harvard Yard, and that’s how he ended up making a living? Oh my lovely, my lovely, my lovely.
Providence
SARAH GOTTLIEB leans against the passenger-side door of Walt Kaplan’s borrowed Ford Victoria. It’s a shutterthwacking Thursday morning in November 1938. Walt, clean-shaved, bandy-legged, stands on the sidewalk facing her, still not saying anything. So quiet now the only sound is the wind and the clack of the leaves somersaulting across bricks. Sarah is hefty, round-faced, and strong—mocking him with deviled eyes, tapping the toe of her high-heeled shoe on the running board of the car like a miniature hammer, her calf working, working. He’s also chubby, closer to all-out fat than she is; he makes a face when he sucks in his belly so that he can button his pants. Now he’s spreading his arms wide to form a huge bewildered Why? But still not speaking. Her face isn’t budging, so what’s the use of fighting back, of talking at her deaf ears. He grinds his teeth and involuntarily begs her name, mouths soundlessly, “Sarah.” She doesn’t bother to shake her head and certainly doesn’t need to use her voice to say no again. Her face: Never, never, never, never, never. What do I care? Plead all day. It’s still never, till hell freezes over and the goblins go ice-skating. Walt turns and looks at the pea-gree
n house, sees the mother in the front window glaring. Which is worse, that ancient scowler or this hyena? Same face as the one in the window, only thicker and rosier. He wonders how a little flesh can make such a difference. That one in the window so far from beautiful he’d have to be chained and dragged to do the things that with this one he re-enacts in his head nightly, daily, afternoonly. He looks back at Sarah, who is now twirling a silver necklace around her pinkie. How could it have turned into this? She knows what we need to do. The paperwork’s filed. And didn’t she say three days ago that if she had to live in that putrid house another day she’d hang herself by the flagpole in front of Durfee High? Now he’s ready, everything’s ready, and here she is all done up and beautiful, lipstick and that hat, and all he can do is look daftly from her mouth to her knees, fat little knees he could eat without mustard. Because now it’s an unbudgeable no. Though it’s no more than twenty degrees, he’s sweating already in his new wool suit. Hasn’t opened his trap since he pulled the car up to the house and already sweating like his undershirted father ranting around the store. Except he’s here in broad daylight, on the sidewalk, pleading like the ignoramus she’s convinced him he is. Sarah continues to tap her feet, her little doomsday clock ticking, ticking, sucking up his courage by the gallon. And there’s nothing to say that he hasn’t begged for with his eyes already. That if she wants to run, he’ll run. That he’s got a car. (Yes, it’s his brother Leon’s, but at least till Sunday night it’s his.) Enough cash for the moment. A car and enough money. What else is there in this country? It’s never been a question of going very far. He has a decent job, and though the mother’s a witch, there are too many others in the family, too many friends; they can’t leave for good. Simply going away for a few days to make it all legal. But that feverish tap-tap-tapping, that face taunting him. He feels the mother’s eyes on the back of his head. Surrounded. Ambushed by women. Goddamnit, does he love this Sarah down to her shoes. God forgive him for wishing the mother a corpse already.