The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  The streetcar is empty, the city still quiet, though in minutes it will crowd up and erase this version of itself. These are moments he loves, though with money in his pocket he would love them more. At the store he sweeps the carpet and polishes the cases, sweeps the front sidewalk, wipes smudges from the windows. He can’t call Sadie until Bill’s left their house: Bill is unyielding, a killjoy. Irving waits. Eats a slice of bread—that’s all he can stomach—and straightens the office and arranges his father’s tools. Finally it is eight o’clock; Bill ought to be at work. Irving picks up the store telephone and the operator connects him to Sadie.

  He feigns a measured calm. “Sadie, there’s a problem.”

  “Goldie?”

  “No, no, not so serious, but I don’t want Papa upset. I made a mistake.”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t think I’m a dope. I misplaced some petty cash.”

  She sighs. “Irving, how did you manage that?”

  “I don’t exactly know. I lost it.”

  “How much?”

  “Five dollars.”

  “Papa gave you five dollars out of petty cash?”

  “No. It didn’t work that way.”

  “God, Irving. He’ll be livid.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  He can cover the money from the drawer until the daily cash-out, unless there’s a big sale and Papa makes an early deposit. Replacing the five dollars “as soon as possible would be good,” he says. “You wouldn’t have five dollars, would you?”

  “Promise me you won’t lose a cent.”

  “I swear,” Irving says. “I promise.”

  She tells him she’ll be there. By noon, she says, and for the moment he is safe.

  After he opens, morning at the store is slow drudgery, a few earring sales, his father hunched over the jeweler’s bench, setting stones in engagement rings, a faint breeze through the front screen door and outside high sun, dollops of cloud. A far better day for Crystal Beach: no suit-wearing, hardly any clothes at all, cool water, the sun warming your skin, plenty of girls. That’s how you clear a hangover, how you turn your luck around.

  And maybe Crystal Beach is where Goldie’s taken herself: it would be a fine choice. He never figured her to be the one to go, not like this—eloping with her piano player maybe, and why not? Irving’s been half-ready for Celia to lose herself in trouble, of course: ignoring train crossings, walking on river ice, trusting a thug. But Celia is fine—maybe her oddness protects her. And Goldie? Goldie, whose bossiness can kill you—if she knew about the petty cash she’d make him earn it back—but she is sweet when she relents. Goldie, who in his schoolboy days would kiss him on the forehead. For a while, he hasn’t paid attention to her, and now he wants to pay less attention: the way she surfaces can be alarming. Last weekend at the burlesque he was watching a woman’s legs and wondering how close they came to the shape of Goldie’s. He doesn’t know the shape of Goldie’s thighs and it occurs to him that he wants to, and also that this is not brotherly. Another man would be ashamed of the thought, and he is not, just troubled by the uncertainty of form, the inability to imagine her. Perhaps he should try to have more shame. He isn’t a bad man. It’s true he drinks, but so does the whole city; it’s true he’s drawn to looser women than Rachel Brownstein, but so is his father; it’s true he does not love his sisters enough, but what is enough? There seems not to be enough, it’s infinite what they’ll take if you let them. He shuts and bolts a door and still his sisters appear, squeezing through the door frame like mice. Mice on pogo sticks. Mice skating through marbles.

  At eleven o’clock Lillian Schumacher walks in, today wearing beige linen, and garnets his father bought last winter in New York. She’s more subdued than usual, no hint of flirtation, no winsome glances or outright winks, no throaty laugh, but she’s still Lillian, you can always see the spark: even when she’s serious you know she likes pleasure. This time she asks to see gold earrings.

  “We have some beauties,” Irving says, and pulls out the tray. She holds one and then another pair up against the garnets.

  “How is your father?” she says.

  “He’s in back,” Irving says. “It’s a strange time, Miss Schumacher.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. Her voice is, it seems, a summons to his father, which is too bad.

  From the back hall his father says, “I’ll help Miss Schumacher now, Irving. Thank you.”

  Irving crosses behind the counter to the far corner and the tabletop file and sorts June receipts. The timing is not ideal. Sadie is due in soon, and Sadie does not have a full appreciation of Lillian Schumacher. You can’t really blame her: their father has taken up with Lillian too soon, you might say, and Lillian’s reputation does not help. Irving himself has a great appreciation, though it’s unpleasant to see his sisters anywhere near Lillian: they seem to contort. He tries to avoid such convergences, though now he must stay and wait for Sadie. Perhaps his father will take Lillian to an early lunch, missing Sadie, leaving plenty of time to replace the five dollars (provided he doesn’t take lunch money from petty cash, in which case Irving will be forced to lie). Over the receipts Irving can see his father’s stance relax, his father murmuring to Lillian. It’s the point at which either they leave for the workroom or Irving does. Irving hesitates and his father glares over Lillian’s shoulder at him. “Call me if you need me,” Irving says and carries the file box into the back room.

  None of the space here is his, really; the back room is split into an enclosed office and a workroom, both fully his father’s, sparer than the plush front room. There’s a wooden table and a samovar in the office, and a high glass window spilling checked light onto the floor. This is where Irving prefers to sit, where he sweats on the June receipts as he orders them by week, day, and letter, where he hears Sadie’s “Hello, Papa” and a clipped “Hello, Miss Schumacher.” Sadie inquires too sweetly about Irving—she’s staving off a fit, no doubt—and then the soft footsteps over carpet shift to a hard click on the office’s wood floor.

  Sadie’s in a pale pink summer suit, cream heels, and a small cream hat, in defiance of her state, but her face seems pinched, eyelids puffy. “Company today?” She glances toward the front room.

  Irving rises from the table and kisses her on the cheek. “You’re gorgeous,” he says. “Do you have time to sit?”

  “Just a minute.”

  He slides the desk chair to the table and opens a tin of sugar cookies.

  “How often is she here?” Sadie says.

  “Not so much.” His tone is conspiratorial. “Once in a while.”

  She shakes her head, takes a sugar cookie from the tin, and draws her wallet out of her pocketbook, and in those gestures dismisses Lillian Schumacher. Fit averted. She counts out five one-dollar bills and pushes them toward Irving and tucks her wallet back into her pocketbook. He immediately slides the dollars out of view.

  “I’m meeting a few of the girls,” she says. Her mah-jongg friends, doctors’ wives. “Bill thinks it’s a good idea.”

  “It’s a fine idea,” Irving says and squeezes her arm. “Wish I could go with you.”

  “We’ll try lunch next week,” she says. “Depending.” And then she’s on her feet again. She waves toward the empty space where she’d left the money. “That’s done with?”

  “Thank you.” He kisses her again, her scent faintly lilac.

  And then she’s gone, reduced to a voice trailing back from the front room. “I’ve just seen Celia, she’s fine.” There’s a low murmur from his father and nothing from Lillian Schumacher, then Sadie’s clear “Papa, I’ll talk to you later,” the door opening, the door closed.

  His father appears in the office an instant too soon, after Irving’s put the cash in the box, while he’s placing the box back in the desk drawer.

  “Today I’ll go to lunch,” his father says. His eyes are slightly bloodshot—could he, too, be hung over? Unlikely. “An hour. And you are doing what?”

&n
bsp; “Putting the cash box in the drawer,” Irving says. Innocent, even virtuous: as if he has just washed the windows.

  “Why is that?”

  “Oh, Sadie,” Irving says. “She wanted to return a dollar, the one she took for her newspaper ad, the Missing Persons. She didn’t want to trouble you.”

  His father sighs, ushers him aside, counts the money in the box. “You know better,” he says. “Next time you come to me.”

  “Papa, of course.”

  His father’s eyebrows are raised, lips pursed: there’s no mistaking the skepticism. “Irvy,” he says, “just watch the front. Miss Schumacher is waiting.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Sadie

  1929 (LATER SUMMER)

  Sadie thinks of her body as a willful, erratic lap-dog, which sometimes cooperates and sometimes does not. She’s never sure what will happen when Bill climbs into bed with her. The first time, her wedding night, when Bill touched her breasts she was seized with a ticklishness so profound she had to dash to the bathroom to avoid wetting the bed. Sometimes she wakes, her skin sensitive, the texture of the sheets suddenly extravagant, a bodily dreaminess overtaking her. In that state she imagines kissing, a melting, a soft-focus drifting as in Impressionist paintings. This is how she used to imagine marital relations: a light, sugary closeness with the smooth movements of a waltz. Instead there’s a saltiness to Bill’s skin, and his eyes move from intensity to intensity, as if he is listening to a booming, dramatic inner music—hardly a waltz—and often when he touches her the melting sensation becomes a kind of fever, a possession not unlike wild sleeping, frightening, pleasurable, especially in release from the fever. She isn’t always sure if the pleasure is worth the fright, though: the moments of lostness make her wary, distrustful of the whole business. When her body refuses to be lost, she watches the fever overtake her husband, allows the pleasure of his touch, his skin against her skin, but remains detached, as if the true Sadie is perched on the windowsill.

  There are bedroom sounds, Bill’s moaning and occasional bellows, at first alarming though now familiar, her own murmuring and sounds beyond a murmur, which she would not call bleating but would certainly rather not make: these are part of the lostness. She and Bill do not talk about what happens between them, but seem to have a code of hand holding, glasses of water, reading or not reading in bed, proximity or distance in sleep. Tonight, if they did speak, if Sadie could name what there is to name, she might say there’s already too much lostness, even a sister is lost, she can’t bear such immersion. But she doesn’t say this and Bill’s kisses are melting kisses; he touches her, there’s the rising fever, a kind of racing heat, and he enters her. His solidity and the tang of his skin are a familiar return, both exciting and comforting, but as he’s moving inside her the fever turns to panic, as if she is falling into canyons of space and can’t stop falling. And now she is crying instead of murmuring, and Bill has stopped moving, he’s hushing and rocking her, and the panic becomes a night desert stretching infinitely. Behind it Bill’s voice says, “Darling, what is it?”

  A choking. Her throat seems paralyzed and she shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says, and then, absurdly, “a desert.”

  “What?” Bill offers her a glass of water.

  And then the fever is gone. She kisses him, apologizes, rubs circles on his back, touches him lightly down there, the way she does when she’s ready to start. Then it’s as if she’s perched on the windowsill again, observing the ceiling shadows and the alterations in Bill’s face. After quiet feverless lovemaking, when Bill has fallen asleep, she runs a bath.

  In the tub her legs float. She will not envision a death. There are already enough dead. A dead mother is plenty. Isn’t it better to conjure the image of Goldie returning, walking into the Lancaster house with a shopping bag, bread from the bakery (a vision that exonerates Celia too)? Goldie cooks dinner—in truth, a mixed blessing, she never did get the knack—quietly reads in the kitchen while the kettle begins to boil. In her presence there’s the shock of the ordinary—she’s here, she’s back—you’re too stunned to say anything. Look, there she is, hair pinned up, thick brown waves dislodging the clips. Ten minutes later: there she is, still, her slim muscular arms, narrow hands, the chipped tooth, the plump lower lip. Goldie. Wouldn’t you at first accept her back, with gratitude? Thank God, we were worried. Only later, when it’s clear she’s not an apparition and will stay at least the night, after she’s cooked that first mediocre supper, the doubts creep in: will she leave again? And with doubts, the rage that she disappeared in the first place, your blank ignorance as to why. Is there nothing you can do to make her stay? And if not, if it’s that random, what are you doing accepting her back so easily? How little she must value you to do something like this. How dare she.

  Sadie finds herself soaped up and jammed between how dare she and dead, the white bath bubbles making tiny popping sounds. And here she pulls up short: this will not do. She has a husband and a house, and a garden in which crabgrass has begun to encroach on the petunias. She must stay in possession of herself.

  AT 6 A.M. the telephone rings, a jarring trill in the living room. She swivels to the side of the bed, a swish of pale blue nightgown— the blue surprises her, she’d forgotten she’d put that on after the bath. Bill’s already out of bed and she hears the rush of water from the bathroom faucet and the squeak of the turning tap, the stopped rush, footsteps down the hall and stairs to the ringing telephone. As she rounds the stairs, he’s half-turned in the dim room, glow of white undershirt, thin belly and muscled arms, cheek curve, rim of wire glasses. Bill says, “Yes,” and “What have you heard?” and “Papa Abe, what have you heard?” He turns in Sadie’s direction: there’s a wide smear of shaving foam on his chin and right cheek, as if he’s dipped his face in meringue. When he shakes his head, a small dollop flies onto the carpet. “It’s a little early, Papa,” he says. “She’s here.” He gives Sadie the telephone, slippery from his wet hands.

  “There is no tea.” Her father’s voice is a low blast through the receiver: it seems he is shouting. “A little coffee only.” Apparently no one at the Lancaster house has marketed, something Goldie does twice a week.

  “Good morning, Papa,” Sadie says. “Why don’t you have your tea downtown? I’ll see what I can do.”

  “We always have tea,” her father says.

  “I know.” She lowers her voice, in the unlikely chance that her father will follow her example. “What else do you need?”

  Bill sighs from the staircase and in the sigh she hears mild outrage, which surfaces whenever her family makes odd requests— but it’s outrage undercut by shaving foam.

  “You come see,” her father shouts. And then, mystified, “Did no one teach Celia to cook?”

  SHE DEVOTES the afternoon to the Lancaster house: inventories the pantry, plans for the week. Celia follows. “Papa says you’re out of tea,” Sadie says.

  “Um hmm,” Celia says.

  “You knew that?”

  “It’s been a couple of days.”

  “You should buy some, then.”

  And Celia’s face opens in surprise, as if Sadie’s suggested raising sheep. She wrinkles her nose and retreats upstairs when Sadie offers to market with her, though the grocer on Elmwood isn’t far or strange—the family has shopped there for years. It’s historical fact: Celia has marketed. And Celia has cooked, though admittedly her concentration’s spotty. But maybe it’s Sadie’s mood Celia is responding to, the undeniable impatience: even the cat seems wary.

  There is something satisfying in shopping alone, isn’t there? No one slowing her pace or complicating simple tasks. Though as a girl she’d look forward to marketing with her mother, who’d joke with the store owners and chat with her friends, all of whom shopped at the same time every week. The best days coincided with Sadie’s father’s trips to New York: then her mother always seemed lighter, their routine chores oddly festive. While marketing, her mother would laugh easily and give he
r lemon drops, and the grocery became a kind of party, apples and beets passing for decoration.

  Today the grocery is altogether ordinary, the narrow aisles crowded, the owners preoccupied. Sadie hurries through, then to the closest bakery, stopping short of going to the butcher. And when she returns to the house, there is at first a silence, though it’s already dinnertime. Her father’s not even home. She brews tea, puts eggs and potatoes on to boil, and it occurs to her that these are Goldie’s tasks and gestures. She watches her own hands as she sorts lettuce, separating the tender leaves from the bitter ones. Here she is in Goldie’s place, doing Goldie’s work in Goldie’s manner: she concentrates, pours water on the lettuce, and the periphery of the kitchen begins to fall away as she repeats Goldie’s name to herself. There is the sound-thought, the leaves, the water, and for a moment nothing else but the fervent will to make Goldie appear; it’s the kind of consuming wish she felt as a child. But while she’s drying the lettuce leaves, she notices a faint smell of tobacco smoke: Jo’s in her usual spot on the back porch, with a cigarette, watching through the window. And then Jo’s leaning in the kitchen door, blowing smoke into the house. She doesn’t say hello, or offer help, just leans into the doorjamb and observes. The set of her shoulders makes you want to smack her. No wonder Goldie’s gone — but there’s the trap, speculating again.

  “Papa’s late today?” Sadie says.

  “You could say that,” Jo says.

  “I have to get home.”

  “You know where he is, don’t you? With her.” The cigarette hangs from Jo’s lips. She forms a circle with her left index finger and thumb, and pushes her right index finger in and out of the circle, and a thin line of smoke curves above her head. “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  “I don’t want to discuss this.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”