Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  “Sare,” he says, though he hadn’t meant to. He’d meant to rehearse the final assault in his mind first, to get the sound right, somewhere in the gray between a bullyrag and a threat. But instead he only blurts, forcelessly, his voice octaves higher than he’s ever heard it, “Sare—”

  Only then it comes:

  “Awright already.”

  Her voice, too, from somewhere other than her eyes and mouth, as though her throat rebelled before it could be hushed. A squeaked “Sare” answered by an irritated, but at the same time simple, unequivocal “Awright already.” Have ever more glorious words been spoken by a woman? That evil crone in the house must notice something in the way Walt’s shoulders go from clenched to juggly loose, because the next moment she’s kicking open the front door and shrieking. Sarah very nearly doesn’t have time to retrieve the little Samsonite she’s hidden in the bushes beside the house. What the mother screams at them, who knows amid the slamming doors and the flush of the Ford’s V-8? And their hyperventilating laughter, like two suddenly different people hurtling into that car. By the time the tiny shawled bundle of rage reaches the curb, Sarah and Walt are already sailing across Highland Avenue. To freedom, their first shared thought, as the car lunges forward, blurring houses, lawns, garages, a man raking leaves.

  Left alone in front of the pea-green house, Frieda Gottlieb shouts at her staring neighbors, the frightened Portuguese housewives peering sneakily out their kitchen windows. Forever convinced that still, after generations, not one of the encroachers knows a single word of English, Frieda barks, like the schoolteacher she was a thousand years ago, “My daughter equals whore.” She snarls, “Daughter, whore. In English they mean the same thing.”

  In the car they head toward Providence, Rhode Island, where the laws are easier. So long as you got a signed letter of consent from the marriageable woman to the court three days prior to the date of the proposed marriage, you could get a license in the morning, matrimony by afternoon. It was practically a money-back guarantee. You paid a little more than in Massachusetts, but the speed made up for that. Sarah’s practically asleep by the time they reach Tiverton. Her mouth is open and she’s breathing loudly, boisterously. Thirty-six miles from Fall River to Providence overland. Tiverton to Providence eighteen miles. Nine-thirty now. License by 11:00, married before 3:00 if the line’s not too long. In Rhode Island justices of the peace get paid by the marriage was what he’d heard, so they get you out of there with no dilly and no dally. After that, dinner at the Fore and Aft in Bristol. Then back to Providence to the Wachman Hotel, where Artie Shaw always stays when he’s in town. And then Arrivederci, nature! He swoops a breath. Hasta luego, woods by the Watuppa! Ciao, blankets and trees! A bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed. A gust jolts them and the car swoons. Sarah opens her eyes and murmurs, “Stop kidnapping me, Walt. You have no right to kidnap.” He watches her pull her heels off and plop her feet, feet as big as his, on the dash. She yawns and droops her head again.

  He thinks, The only bad thing about this is the secrecy. Of course he’d told Leon everything. In order to get the car and the days off from the store, he’d had to. This meant that Bets knew everything, too. But both Leon and Bets knew they weren’t to let anything out until Walt and Sarah got back from Rhode Island legitimate. Which meant the same thing in Massachusetts as it did in Rhode Island, because of the full faith and credit clause of the United States Constitution. Since he was going to have a wife instead of college, he was going to have to teach himself things. A marriage in Rhode Island’s a marriage in Massachusetts, and so on and so forth. But more important than the paper they’d bring home was getting the green light from Sarah to tell everybody. This was her show—she was the one with the mother. The Kaplans, upstarts, were supposed to feel lucky Sarah was allowing Walt into their fold, who cared how. Because Frieda Gottlieb, of course, was a different kettle of fish; her money was older. She had a lot less of it, but that didn’t matter. She might be locked away in that horrible green house in a neighborhood already gone to pot, but goddamnit it, her money was older, two generations older. The whole family, even the gang of pucker-faced cousins who talked like they were from England, make Walt squirm. And that Albert, always singing to himself, growing a full mustache at fifteen—even her little brother makes him nervous. The only one he likes is the dead father in the front hall picture, the one they all still talk to, good morning and good night, as if he’s still among the living. But that mother…a snake with hair and legs.

  He dismisses them all from his mind and rubs the leather on the side of the door, whistles quietly. Nineteen years old and he doesn’t feel particularly old. But he doesn’t feel that young anymore either. It’s whole that he feels. More complete than yesterday. Yesterday, a day of trying on suits, shoes, ducking out of work early. Sarah’s hand rests on the seat near his knee and he reaches for her wrist but doesn’t touch it. Feet as big as his, but hands and wrists so small. Her wrists the daintiest thing about a girl not so dainty. He allows himself this moment where she can’t chastise him. “You aren’t marrying a ballerina,” she’d say if she noticed him admiring her wrists, which would mean more than the obvious. It would also mean he wasn’t marrying Bets, who used to dance ballet. Bets so light and tiny. Sometimes Leon carried her around on his palm like a waiter serving drinks. And yes, sometimes he does think about his sister-in-law’s legs, the way she leaps when she walks, the way she closes her knees together when she sits, splaying her little bird feet out, but that’s different, different.

  Frieda Gottlieb tightens the shawl around her head by yanking on the ends. She stands in the front hall and looks at herself in the mirror and thinks of the ways Isadore went wrong with Sarah. The worst by far being that he took her to work with him. Let her play in the factory like a dirty-kneed Irish brat. Why did he raise her like she was a boy when he had a boy already? Grown man playing games with his daughter in a factory full of men and anybody has to ask where she went wrong? But wasn’t she a beautiful baby, all cheeks, big pouches drooping? Frieda examines her own face, not wrinkled so much as pressed in, as though her features are retreating into her head. The girl’s eighteen! Didn’t I love you, Poo? I didn’t play hide-and-seek with you and the grubby men who wanted to take you out in the field behind the factory and do unspeakables, but didn’t I love you? Frieda looks at herself, but she talks now to Isadore, whose picture, as always, lurks behind her, lording the front hall as he never did in life. Always more court jester than king, and maybe if he’d taken his own life more seriously for half a second, she wouldn’t be out there. Frieda listens to the slow creak of life as Albert begins his wake-up routine upstairs. Her late-sleeping son. So oblivious to anything that goes on in this house. Your sister’s run away for good today. Huh? What, Ma? Who’s runnin’ where? She listens to Albert in the bathroom, the pipes groaning and thwacking throughout the house, the plumbing another reminder of Isadore’s ineptitude. My daughter the slut with the little white suitcase her father gave her. Perhaps he knew how she was going to use it one day. Albert drops a glass on the bathroom floor. Yells, “Damnit! Ma!”

  And she will not crawl back here no matter what monstrous else she’s carrying besides that suitcase.

  Frieda looks at her face and touches her forehead as if to mark her own words. That’s what’s for certain. Banished. She can drown in her own stew out there, never here. Frieda goes to the kitchen for a broom and dustbin. Just before her face leaves the mirror, she sees those jowls, how they sagged off that beautiful child like popped balloons.

  After he finds a space on Benefit Street behind the courthouse, Walt gently shakes her awake. Sarah opens her eyes slowly and realizes the car has stopped, that it’s happening. For the first time all day her eyes betray that she’s frightened. She has been since the moment she woke up and began furiously packing the suitcase, but she wasn’t foolish enough to let Walt know. She was well aware what impact her fear would have on his resolve. Walt so skittish. Pu
ffs his chest like such a big man, but when it comes down to it, he’s scared of anything and everybody, especially her mother, who will twist her hands together for how long after this escape? Escape! As if this even resembled one. If what they were doing was escaping, they were like a couple of convicts breaking out and then stopping for coffee across the street from the prison. They weren’t forty miles from Fall River. After three nights in a hotel (of all of it, the news that they’d stayed in a hotel would torture her mother the most), they’d go home. To a little place he found on Weetamoe, the top half of a house that at least, thank God, wasn’t green. It was fading yellow, nearly white in the sun. Walt would take a risk only so far. But it made sense, didn’t it? His job. Our friends. But couldn’t we have gone and done this out of New England? So the fear in her eyes isn’t of her mother’s wrath, which can take a flying leap for all she cares. Let her yowl her head off. Let her rot in that house, with the neighbors hiding under their kitchen tables.

  No, what Sarah’s afraid of is Monday afternoon, of being alone in that little furnished place on Weetamoe on Monday afternoon, of staring out the window at the corner. She sees herself watching some Italian kid jumping rope in the street. A little girl in a brown dress with big buttons that flops as she leaps. The girl, clean-faced but dirty all over, doesn’t see her, and wouldn’t think much if she had. Just another lady staring out the window like bored ladies do. But what choice do I have really? And aren’t I getting out of that house? Weetamoe’s only ten blocks up the hill from Robeson, but isn’t there a continent in those ten blocks? From her face, yes. Which is all that counts, though of course she also knows that a mother’s silent judgment reaches you wherever you are. That’d be true if she ran to Rio de Janeiro.

  Walt doesn’t notice the glaze of fear in her eyes. He’s straightening his tie and tucking in his shirt as best he can while he’s still sitting in the driver’s seat.

  “All right, banana,” he says. “Good sleep?”

  She doesn’t say anything, just looks at him, curious at how someone can just plow along, unbogged. Not even fathoming what this is about, and it’s so obvious. Nostrils in a book his whole life, like her yeshiva-boy cousin Harry. Maybe reading shrinks Walt’s brain. She’s almost envious, and for a second she permits herself to be genuinely pleased. But she resists the urge to say something nice to him and slips on her shoes. She gets out of the car and takes in the huge red-brick courthouse, which according to Walt is famous in Providence because it dates back to the time of Roger Williams. Roger Williams, she thinks, another one who fled Massachusetts for postage-stamp Rhode Island. But at least he never got back in his canoe and went home to Monday morning. She stands on tiptoe and talks to Walt over the roof of the car.

  “I wasn’t going to do this, you know.”

  “Oh.” Walt lolls his head on the edge of the top of the car and watches her. He’s on the verge of smiling outright, but he’s unwilling to risk it.

  “I only put my suitcase in the bushes in case I capitulated.”

  He perks his head up. “So you capitulated?” Now he laughs. “Oh, Sare, I didn’t think you had it—”

  “I didn’t say I did.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just changed my mind. You certainly didn’t convince me of anything. And you aren’t rescuing me either, so put your white horse back in the stable.”

  “You’re as booby a meshuggeneh as your mother.”

  She sniggers, but doesn’t say anything. Walt walks around the car and takes hold of her arms. She thrusts her head away, dramatically, like a girl in the movies who really wants to be kissed but doesn’t want to show it, except that Sarah doesn’t want to be kissed. Right now she doesn’t even want to look at him for fear that he will see what her joy looks like. Because even though she’s a little woozy now, it’s there, and it’s disgusting. Smack on her face in Rhode Island. He’ll see, and then he’ll kill himself trying to make it so she feels this way for three days straight. And God forbid longer. Which would not only be impossible, it would make her berserk. So to rid herself of joy, she imagines what’s to come. She thinks of the calculations. Hmmm, let’s see, if the baby was born in May, hmmmm, well, there’s November, December, January, February, March, hmmm…But even that’s a hell of a lot better than being invisible, and she thinks again of that girl skipping rope in the street, not even bothering to look up at the lady in the window. And she watches herself, Sarah, ram her fist through the glass to get that little snot’s attention.

  “You want to walk around the block? Huh? My cauliflower? My eggplant, my Sallygirl? Wake up a little more?”

  She doesn’t answer, only jerks from his grip and marches toward the looming steps. Walt, without hesitation, hustles into line behind her, smoothing his suit with trembling hands. She’s a plump, high-heeled Black Jack Pershing in a blue hat with white frills, and he’s a grinning doughboy who’d follow her into any slaughter without a second thought, mortar fire bursting, come what may.

  4.

  The Waters

  By God we’ll love each other or die trying.

  —Sherwood Anderson,

  “Song of the Soul of Chicago,”

  from Mid-American Chants

  Michigan City, Indiana

  A WHITE-BORDERED black-and-white photograph of my grandfather and my father looking out at Lake Michigan. The picture was taken in Michigan City, Indiana, in the late 1940s. My grandfather and my father are visible from behind. There is no mistaking the shape of my grandfather. He is 5'7'', bold, forward, and squat. The muscles in his shoulders are bunched up so that his neck and his shoulders meet as one, like the gentle slope at the bottom of a mountain. He is pointing at the lake. With his other hand he is holding my father’s hand. My father is wearing a fedora that is too big for his head.

  My grandfather is telling my father about the lake, about how many miles it is from north to south, east to west, about how ferocious it can be, about the ships it has swallowed. He is telling my father about the towns with Indian names along the Michigan and Wisconsin coasts. Muskegon, Manistee, Sheboygan, Mantiwoc. A place called Fort Michilimackinac, where the British vanquished the French in 1761. My father says nothing. When my grandfather was gone in the war, my father used to draw pictures of him riding on his ship. Pictures with crayon captions like YOU KILLER JAPS BEWARE MY DAD!!! But now that my grandfather has returned, my father is afraid of him, of his shouting confidence, of the attacking way he handles his fork at the dinner table. And my father knows that the war didn’t make my grandfather this way. He remembers it was this way before, too. He’d hoped with all his pictures and all his praying that the war would either change his father or kill him. Neither has happened. And he is ten years old and looking out into the glare of the summer lake, and although my grandfather’s voice is soft and playful, the hand that holds my father’s is a wrench that slowly tightens around his aching fingers. The boy stares out at the vast and tries to see what his father sees.

  The Raft

  MY GRANDFATHER, who lost his short-term memory sometime during the first Eisenhower administration, calls me into his study because he wants to tell me the story he’s never told anybody before, again. My grandmother, from her perch at her dressing table, with the oval mirror circled by little bulbs I used to love to unscrew, shouts, “Oh, for God’s sake, Seymour. We’re meeting the Dewoskins at Twin Orchard at seven-thirty. Must you go back to the South Pacific?”

  My grandfather slams the door and motions me to the chair in front of his desk. I’ll be thirteen in two weeks. “There’s something I want to tell you, son,” he says. “Something I’ve never told anybody. You think you’re ready? You think you’ve got the gumption?”

  “I think so.”

  “Think so?”

  “I know so, sir. I know I’ve got the gumption.”

  He sits down at his desk and stabs open an envelope with a gleaming letter opener in the shape of a miniature gold sword. “So you want to know?”

  �
�Very much.”

  “Well then, stand up, sailor.” My grandfather’s study is carpeted with white shag. It feels woolly against my bare feet. I twist my toes in it. In the room there are also many cactuses. My grandfather often encourages me to touch their prickers to demonstrate how tough an old bird a plant can be. My grandfather captained a destroyer during World War II.

  “It was late,” he says. “There was a knock on my stateroom door. I leaped up. In those days I slept in uniform—shoes, too.” My grandfather smiles. His face is so perfectly round that his smile looks like a gash in a basketball. I smile back.

  “Don’t smile,” he says. “Just because I’m smiling, don’t assume I couldn’t kill you right now. Know that about a man.”

  “Oh, Seymour, my God,” my grandmother says through the door. “Anyway, isn’t he supposed to be at camp? Call his mother.”

  He looks at me and roars at the door, “Another word out of you, ensign, and I’ll have you thrown in the brig, and you won’t see Beanie Dewoskin till V-J Day.”

  “I’ll make coffee,” my grandmother says.

  “It was late,” I say. “There was a knock.”