“You just wiped your nose on your shirt,” I said.
“Why shouldn’t I?” she said weepily. “You wipe your nose on napkins, for God’s sake.”
“I haven’t done that for quite a while—”
“You scream and kick and rant and rave,” she went on. “You think somebody’s an ass, you say they’re an ass.”
“Not to their face,” I said, ashamed.
“So what? You say it. Carol, do you realize I never say anything bad about anyone?”
“Of course you don’t,” I said. “That’s why—”
“They all think I’m so good,” she said.
“You are.”
“Listen to me,” she said. “Listen to me.” She grabbed my arms. “I tell you I’m scared. Mark thinks I’m—wonderful.” Her voice shook. “I love him so much, Carol. What happens when he finds out?”
“Finds out what?” I said in bewilderment.
“That I’m not wonderful.”
“But you are,” I said again.
“Shut up!” She sat up straighter. I shut up, never having been told to shut up by Elena. It just wasn’t her style. “I always thought when I got older it would be different. I could just relax—be more like you—” My mouth fell open. Nothing came out. “—say the things I’m really thinking, not be so nice all the time. Nice, nice, they’re always telling me how nice I am. I’m not that nice! No one is!”
I was stunned by the thought that Elena’s perfection had been as much a burden to her as my crying had been to me. I wanted badly to help her, as she had helped me once. She had had the simple right words for me, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say. So I just hugged her a lot more, until she said, “I’ll be all right now, Carol. Thanks.” I went back to my room. I wanted very much to cry, and I didn’t.
The next day the weather was perfect. “Nervous?” my mother asked Elena at breakfast. She shook her head. She looked like herself again, at least the self I recognized.
So then, the wedding in our backyard. One of Mark’s friends sang. My parents stood on one side of Elena and Mark, and his parents and his grandmother stood on the other side. I didn’t hear too much of the ceremony. I was thinking about Elena, and I was thinking about me. About all the years behind me, and all the years ahead. About last night, and about tears and fears and other foul things.
When I looked up, Mark and Elena were kissing. They were married. My sister was a married woman. Elena, I thought, Elena, everything is changing.
A woman sitting next to me touched my arm. “Are you crying, dear? You’re the sister of the bride, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am. But I’m not crying.” And indeed I wasn’t.
Down Here on Greene Street
Lillian leans out the window watching Greene Street wake up. The morning shift of nurses, like white birds, are hurrying into the hospital, a big, sprawling red brick building, catty-corner from Lillian’s house. Always something going on there. Down the block she sees that some old bum is sleeping in the doorway of the High Life Bar again. The sight makes her philosophical.
Down here on Greene Street I seen a lot, she thinks, and lights her first cigarette of the day. I seen men die and I seen babies born. This is a modest exaggeration. In the seventy years she’s lived on Greene Street, she’s seen one actual dead body and one baby born, when the parents didn’t quite make it to the hospital and she happened to be right there on the street. But you never know, keep your eyes open, and you might see anything on Greene Street. And puffing on her cigarette, Lillian says vigorously, “Yeah, Greene Street!”
Really, she is thinking not about Greene Street now, but Fred Michel. Fred has certainly got a very red face, although after ten days she hardly ever notices it anymore. A nice, nice man. That’s just what she told Raff, who only wanted to hear that Lillian is not serious about this idea of going to live with Fred in Florida.
“Don’t do anything without talking to me first,” Raff ordered.
“I got along a good many years okay on my own advice,” Lillian says, waving her cigarette, practicing what she’ll tell her daughter when she phones later.
A boy on a bike, with newspapers in a big canvas bag over his shoulder, pedals by. It’s going to be another hot day. The sun already glints off the cars. Summertime sure isn’t her most favorite time on Greene Street, but she can’t complain. Here she is, seeing another summer, another day. And this early in the morning there’s a nice breeze coming in the window.
If this was your ordinary day—but it isn’t, Lillian reminds herself. Fred is coming over for lunch. She looks around the living room with a judicious eye, planning what she’ll do to spruce it up. She’s got the menu all planned. “How’s this, Teddy Blue?” she says to the stuffed blue plush teddy bear sitting in the place of honor on the TV. “Deviled eggs, Parker House rolls, baked beans, sweet pickles, lemon Jell-O with bananas. And ice cream!” Some feast, Lillian thinks with as much satisfaction as if the meal were already spread out in front of her.
Usually in the morning after her chores, Lillian goes downstairs, sits on the stoop awhile watching Greene Street, then walks over to the elementary school where the city council put in a bench under a tree so mothers and so forth could sit down while their children play. There’s a fountain there. There’s swings, a slide, monkey bars, and so forth. It’s a fine place to sit and Lillian enjoys watching the kids jumping around and screaming and brawling with each other. Her enjoyment is certainly one way Lillian knows she’s not young anymore, because when her girls were kids, if they brawled, she wouldn’t hesitate to cuff them both. A cuff for Rafferty, a cuff for Vera, always equal; she didn’t favor one over the other. Back then her nerves couldn’t stand fighting. Too much on her mind all the time. But now it’s just fine with her to see kids picking at each other; all that energy, all that life—it just makes Lillian smile with pleasure. And if a mother gets too upset, Lillian will soothe her down a little, say, “Oh, they’re just kids, it don’t mean a thing, does it?”
Lots of times the mother will sort of smile with relief and just relax back against the seat. Lillian understands. No woman wants another woman to think she’s a bad mother, can’t control her kids or raise them right not to fight.
Sometimes Lillian gets into a nice little talk with the mother. Start on the weather (Hot day, isn’t it?), then go to the kids (Hard work, but worth it), and after that, how the price of every living thing is going up every living day. Lillian certainly enjoys these little chats. “Just call me Lillian,” she says, but sometimes the mother, who might be very young, even still a teen-ager, will say, “Oh, no, I couldn’t.” “Well, then, how about Mrs. Lillian?”
It comes out sometimes that Lillian lives alone and, even with two daughters, has no grandchildren. She always tries to give this information in her best matter-of-fact voice, and the same if the conversation gets around to Vera. Lillian’s not, you know, looking for anybody’s pity.
If her new friend is very, very interested, well then Lillian might tell her how, for eight years, Vera was going to come home for a visit, or Lillian was going to get in an airplane (for the first time) and visit her out there in Spokane. And she’ll say how, you know, there was never enough money, or the weather was bad, or one or the other of them was sick. Not sick enough for alarm, just too sick to travel or have a visitor. Eight years she didn’t see Vera. And then she gets a letter from a stranger telling her her daughter was dead. “Dear Mrs. Rouse, you don’t know me, but I’m a friend of your daughter Vera …” How does a person, a beautiful young person you think is healthy and has the rest of her life to live, die so young and so far away from home and all of a sudden like that? Heart attack. They said it was a freak. Lillian never understood why her daughter’s heart should stop working while hers would go on beating, strong as a horse, inside her chest.
Her park friend, hearing all this and full of sympathetic feelings, might pat Lillian’s hand. Lillian’s eyes will get wet. And it will al
l come over her again—the loss of her beautiful Vera.
And then later, sitting by her window in her favorite chair, looking down over Greene Street, cigarette in the corner of her mouth, Lillian likely will go into a daydream about Vera. Little Vera. Remember how women used to stop her on the street to say, “What a gorgeous child!” Rafferty was by no means a plug-ugly, but just didn’t have a chance that way next to her little kid sister.
When Lillian thinks now of all the years, all the months, all the days and hours Vera and Rafferty lived with her, she’s truly amazed at how little of it she remembers. Mostly it’s snips here and snips there. Once in a dream she felt Vera’s silky hair, felt it in her fingers and could still feel it when she woke up—those two little tangled, silky pigtails.
Lillian dreams about Raff, too, but not so much. She hopes she isn’t playing favorites, but since she sees Raff one or two times a year when she comes up from New Jersey to visit, it’s certainly different.
At the thought of Raff, Lillian coughs chestily. Raff called her yesterday and would be calling again today, telling her, “Ma, don’t do it. You don’t know this man. And at your age—”
“Seventy-two isn’t that old, Rafferty,” Lillian says out loud.
“You think you’ll go to beautiful Florida beaches,” Raff had said. “They’re all polluted. Full of tar, too. You can’t even walk on the sand.”
“I’ll walk on the sidewalks, then, like I do here.” Now Lillian has all the answers for Raff. Yesterday she listened and coughed.
In Florida she and Fred could walk together, listen to the radio, and watch the TV together: one night her favorite programs, the next night his. No more meals alone, no more sleeping alone, either. She won’t say that to Raff, though—could just hear that little snort Raff gives when she thinks something is foolish. Raff is a lawyer—an amazing thing—went back to school when she was forty, and now she’s a real lawyer. No kids.
Isn’t it funny, Lillian thinks, how to a stranger you might sort of delicately hint around—was it by chance or choice that you have no children? But ask your own flesh and blood? Oh, no. Lillian has never come right out and asked Raff why no kids. In her heart Lillian is afraid that Raff will say she had no children because Lillian was such a poor mother.
I tried, I tried, I did my best, Lillian thinks, but she knows she did a lot of wrong things, such as filling her girls’ air with cigarette smoke, and not always feeding them the very best good foods (sometimes so tired from working all day, she’d just heat up a can of beans, open a package of white bread). And what hurts her most is to remember hitting them for a least little thing. Not hard hits, but still, when she thinks of it now, it’s real hurtful to her, brings on the bad feelings.
Okay, enough of that. Better stop this dreaming and get up and clean up her house. “Okay, Raff, I’m doing it,” Lillian says, as if Raff could X-ray her eyes through the miles that separate them to see if Lillian is letting things go to pot. That old dump, Raff has said a thousand times.
No denying, this part of Greene Street has gone down somewhat over the years, the bar at the corner coming in and some of the houses getting real rundown, and the old Patterson place, that used to be such a big beautiful house always filled with snotty little Patterson kids, now torn down. And what goes up in its place, but a welding shop. Not what you would call high class. Even so, Greene Street, down its whole long winding length, is still a neighborhood place.
Raff has been after Lillian for years to come live with her and Martin in Teaneck. “You shouldn’t live alone at your age, Mother.” Well, now she’s thinking about not living alone, and Raff is having lawyer’s fits. Telling Lillian she’s getting on, and what if she gets sick, and who is this man, and why is she so stubborn.
Lillian pinches out her cigarette carefully. She’ll smoke the butt later, cigarettes cost the world these days. “That’s why I won’t live with you, Raff,” she says, getting up. “You hate it when I pinch a cigarette. Can’t stand my smoking altogether. And another old thing, you’ll want to put me on a diet, you’ll tell me not to talk so loud, and I sure know we won’t think the same things are funny.”
Lillian checks the TV for her exercise program. Still a little early, so she starts the coffee going, wipes the counters, checks the mousetrap under the sink, and puts on eggs to boil. The ambulance shrieking down the street brings her to the window for a moment. After her babies were born, hearing that ambulance siren day and night gave her a real scared feeling that something would happen to her little ones.
“No, they’ll be all right,” Lenny had said every time. It vexed her. How could he say that? What did he know that she didn’t? But he must have sincerely believed it, otherwise would he have gone off, good man that he was in his heart, and just left her and the two little girls? Eight years he was gone, and then he died of pneumonia.
Poor Lenny. She hardly ever thinks of him now. Her best reminder of Lenny had been Vera, who looked just like him. And then Vera died after being away from Lillian for eight years, too. That number eight sure makes Lillian nervous.
“How many letters in your name?” she asked Fred right after they met. And she counted his whole name. Fred (not Frederic) Michel. Ten letters. Four and six. Also they met in July and on the fifteenth day. Now if it had been August, or on the sixteenth day (two eights) she would have worried.
It’s time for her exercise program. “Arms up,” comes the command from the TV set. Lillian throws up her hands, tries not to see the flesh trembling like Jell-O on her upper arms. “Bend from the waist. And touch those toes, ladies!”
“All right if I just go for the knees?” Lillian inquires. Exercising certainly makes her feel virtuous.
“Mother,” Raff has said a million times, “it would do you a lot more good to lose some weight and give up smoking. Your lungs are probably in terrible shape.”
“Oh, it’s too late to start worrying now,” she tells Raff. She never was one to worry a bone. So many things have happened over the years. All the little things—like Raff breaking her leg, and Lillian having to go on welfare that year she lost her job, and Vera flunking in school (even though the teachers said she was smart). And then the big things—Lillian’s mother getting cancer, dying. Vera dead, age twenty-six. And Lenny, long before that, shooting out there to Arizona for his asthma and never coming back, always waiting for things to get better before asking her and the girls to join him. Just like Lenny to go off somewhere and have the bad sense to die alone.
She still has the letters he’d sent her. Ought to get rid of them. Maybe she would when she went to Florida. “Lillian, you and the girls are coming out as soon as I get the money together … and we’ll have a house, a real house … and I’m going to buy you some bracelets and hair clips, silver hair clips.” Who else but Lenny would say silver hair clips when she was busy figuring ways to put Silvercup bread on the table?
Lillian bends over, puffing. Raff was thirteen, Vera eleven, when their daddy died. Hardly knew him. They cried a little when she told them, then that was that. Raff seemed to cry just as hard about the boozums she didn’t have yet.
“Raff, honey,” Lillian would tell her, “this family, we’re slow developers. Look at me now, and I didn’t have one little anything till I was eighteen.” A small exaggeration, what you might call a white lie, but it made Raff feel better.
“You sure?” she would say, giving Lillian a look from those dark eyes, big round brown eyes, just like Lillian’s own.
“Sure, I’m sure,” Lillian would say, giving Raff a big hug. When they were about three or four and started talking was when Lillian got to really like her girls. She liked a good conversation anytime, and once she could talk person-to-person with Raff and Vera, she was certainly amazed. Those little peanuts had good sense, especially Raff; you just had to look into her brown eyes and you knew that one knew the score.
Vera, now, was altogether a different type, more the dreamy type. Looked like her father and was him all th
e way through—blondie, blue eyes, knock you dead with her looks, but didn’t give a fig about that, all caught up in her dreams.
Just like Lenny, Lillian thinks, jumping heavily up and down and clapping her hands over her head. Ooof … Oooof … That Jack LaLanne is something else, is he really in his sixties? Some men never looked that good in their twenties. She likes a man who takes care of himself, that’s one thing she noticed right away about Fred. Every day, clean socks, clean shirt, and a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket. Classy.
“Michel, used to be Michlowitz,” he told her pretty soon after they met. “My father got it changed by the immigration when he got off the boat.”
“This is a very nice man,” she told Raff. “Clean, and honest.” That honest part, especially, ought to have appealed to Raff, who didn’t ever mind hitting you over the head, so long as she hit you with the truth.
“He’s six years younger than you,” Raff said.
“Five,” Lillian said, right back.
“Mother! You know what I mean.” Forty-seven years old, and sometimes Raff still says Moth-er like she did when she was fifteen. And every time she says it that way—Moth-er—Lillian somehow feels all used up. Funny how your own kids can get you feeling worse than anybody. Why should that be?
“And a final vigorous jog in place to get that heart going,” the TV reminds her.
“If you don’t mind, Jack,” Lillian says, “I’ll pass.”
Anyway, shaking the bathroom rug out the window is good exercise, too. On the street the kids are starting to come out. A girl is bouncing a ball, flipping her leg over it as it rises.
“Hello, Marla, hello, Donna,” Lillian calls down.
“Hello, Mrs. Lillian.… A is for Annette who is Always Awful. B is for Barbara who is a Busy Brat. C is for Celia who is a Curious Cookie. D is for …”
Lillian pulls in the rug, remembering, Oh, Greene Street … mean street … black bean street … Funny how you never forget some things.
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