The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “Samuel Jacob?” Bill says. “Jacob Samuel? Dear? Which?”

  “I’m not sure.” Glen, she thinks. Douglas.

  “Rebecca?” he says.

  Oh. There is tenderness in Bill’s face, but why does such evocation feel like a punch? She swallows and counts to ten. Maybe he has read her mind—Rebecca is her first choice, of course they should name after her mother, but there should be no false Rebeccas. The child has to match the name, especially that name, and how can they know? Of course there’s Goldie too, Golda really. Though you mustn’t name after the living: Goldie could be alive, must be. And Sadie’s back in the puddle again, suppressing a sob. Better, isn’t it, to choose something modern, unmarked by family history?

  PERHAPS TALL WOMEN or stout women carry less obviously, but Sadie is neither and by her seventh month her belly becomes a medicine ball everyone feels entitled to comment on. In department stores complete strangers—women—ask her when the baby is due. Men open doors with small flourishes and smile encouragingly as they size her up. She’s an object of easy public discussion, like the weather. And like the weather unpredictable: on the Hengerer’s Department Store staircase, halfway to the landing, she has to stop. She’s huffing, dizzy and sweating, there’s a small fire in her lower back and the baby seems to be wriggling inside her; she’d brave the embarrassment and sit down on the stairs if she could, but she’s trapped in the streaming crowd, which makes the huffing worse. Sadie hugs the banister, and the baby’s foot, or elbow, or something, presses hard into her side. She could easily be stomped, she thinks. The other shoppers all seem to be in full possession of their bodies, either staring or ignoring her, and the annoying tears begin. A woman in a blue raincoat says, “Let me help you dear,” and two other women make a barrier around which the other shoppers have to walk. They cluck about pregnancy, and a man with pomaded hair nods and openly stares at her belly, and new-comers to the staircase pause to see what’s going on. She’s a huffing weepy spectacle. Can’t this happen in private? Sadie is not the weather—but how is it that she even feels the need to clarify? The strangeness of the idea frightens her into collecting herself. She lets the woman in the blue raincoat lead her to a tearoom.

  When Sadie is calm, when she has had her tea and a slice of cake—was that all it was? she needed lemon cake?—she notices the striped blue and white upholstery of the tearoom chairs, the bright bud vases and glass sugar bowls, and also notices what she has forgotten, how the comments and smiles form a warm mist of approbation, the sort she felt as an A student. Her pregnancy is good and right, she herself is good and right, this is how things are properly done. She is not, as she sometimes fears, walking a thin paper bridge over the paralyzing rapids of Celia’s craziness and Goldie’s absence. She will soon have silver baby spoons and knitted booties and rattles. When the panic strikes again, she wills it away by conjuring tiny hats.

  AT HOME, the department store panic seems distant, incomprehensible, the mistaken intrusion of someone else’s pregnancy and temperament onto hers. Like a party line: sometimes you pick up to the wrong conversation. Instead there’s a pale slant of light against the bedroom sheers, more tea, quick shadows of sparrows skimming in and out of the maples. The baby is no longer jabbing her, and she feels more like she is captaining a boat. She wonders if the tiny hats she imagines are, in some inexplicable way, her mother. As the absence of Jo calling and the absence of Mother Feldstein and this present moment of June light and sparrows are her mother, or the closest she will come. And the need for tiny hats, for sparrows and light is infinite.

  By summer it’s more difficult to care for her own house, more difficult to pay attention to the house on Lancaster, or even to dress properly and put on shoes. In the last several weeks of her pregnancy, she hires a woman named Rosalie to help with the house, a Colored woman with a mild Southern twang; a woman in her twenties with a small son of her own and good references; a churchgoing woman who understands kosher and comes to Sadie’s house in a white uniform. Rosalie uses hair oil, sweet and strong, which permeates the house. Sadie has not asked her to wear a uniform, but apparently this is what one wears. It would be rude, Sadie thinks, to comment on the hair oil.

  Rosalie unfailingly refers to Sadie as Mrs. Feldstein. This is proper and propriety appeals to Sadie: a formal name is like a well-made coat. It is odd to wear a coat in one’s own home, but unavoidable. Sadie is Mrs. Feldstein and Rosalie is Rosalie. And Colored. And in the house for long hours, repeatedly, which of course she must be. Sadie has grown accustomed to silence and retreat, and it’s strange to have someone else there, trailing that odd scent, a woman so vastly unfamiliar. A Colored woman with a Colored husband named Thomas and a Colored son named Thomas, humming what seem to be Colored church songs as she cleans the kitchen. And although Rosalie’s presence is a shock unlike the shock of Sadie’s husband on weekends, for the first few weeks Sadie feels the same impulse to hide in her bedroom. She tries to resist: it is, after all, her house, and she’s happy not to worry about clean floors, isn’t she? She’s worried about floors and laundry since she was nine: it’s a relief, if a fraught one. You have to pretend there’s nothing odd about a stranger managing your underclothes and sheets.

  THE FINAL WEEKS of her pregnancy offer reprieve: for a brief time outside demands drop. Sadie can in fact retreat to her bedroom and no one interrupts her, or expects dinner, or presumes she should manage the house on Lancaster. This in and of itself seems justification for pregnancy. Sadie would like to have her body back, but once that happens the air will change, the quiet will be torn open. Now at least she can read or sleep uninterrupted by anyone, the baby moving but not wailing. This pool of time is ephemeral, and beyond it waits the prospect of rarely being alone or at leisure in the house. Alone with a baby does not count, though she hopes for calm days, for a baby who will easily fall asleep, for that warm dumpling weight and sleep-breathing against her chest. But alone with the baby is also her unhinged neighbor, Delia Lefkowitz, who rhapsodizes about her son’s toes, then weeps from fatigue. Delia’s son is beautiful when he doesn’t scream, Sadie held him herself, marveled at his smallness, the perfection of his mouth and ears and fists. And not all babies scream as he does, she knows this. Sadie will be fine: she reminds herself this before she naps, and again when she rises and washes. She will be fine. And in the afternoon, when she fixes a pot of tea and cuts thick slices of coffee cake for herself and for Rosalie, Rosalie tells her, “You’ll be a good mother, Mrs. Feldstein,” unprompted, and sets the cake aside for one of the Thomases and returns to dusting the cabinets. Has Sadie been sighing again? She does try not to.

  As her due date approaches, Sadie’s retreats to the bedroom seem altogether too lonely. She returns to reading in the living room, and when Rosalie is there—more and more Sadie is glad for Rosalie’s presence—they listen to the radio. She keeps the front curtains closed, and when the telephone rings, Rosalie answers with “Feldstein residence.” She tells everyone but Bill that Sadie is asleep. Some days, Sadie would like to be asleep for Bill too, but that seems improper, far more dubious than lying to the mah-jongg group.

  On weekdays after Rosalie leaves, Bill returns from the land of work and changes the radio from music to news, and kisses Sadie and kisses her belly, and then Sadie remains relentlessly cheerful. It’s exhausting, being so cheerful. Her migraine headaches are not Bill’s fault, she knows that, but it’s peculiar how often they begin in his presence. The cheerfulness must lead to migraines. She does not get migraines around Rosalie. Of course she’s paying Rosalie, paying her well, and that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Rosalie is paid to be helpful and unobtrusive; helpful and unobtrusive, Rosalie will keep this job. And still Sadie feels a comfort and what she might consider a kinship with Rosalie, which seems neither entirely real nor entirely illusory.

  WHAT SADIE EXPERIENCES when she goes into labor she would not call hysteria, but a seesawing between hope and fear. Mortification, yes, at the puddle spreading int
o the living room carpet when her water breaks, at the lack of privacy, the raw exposure in the hospital room, the sweating and moaning, the way ordinary respectable women—she herself—become sweat-soaked, bawling animals. And people who are themselves still ordinary and respectable, doctors, nurses, witnessing all of this; the desperation with which she tries to find them through the saw-toothed contractions; the sweat and murk replacing air. No shred of grace.

  But not hysteria. There is the fear she will split apart before the baby gets out of her; the fear the baby will emerge damaged or dead; frustration that she’s afraid. She cannot change the subject to something more pleasant. In a birthing room there is no way to change the subject. The doctor seems entirely and stupidly calm and she’s grateful for his stupid calm. If only they had knocked her out. If only she could do this in her sleep, and the doctor and the nurses could, after birthing the baby, become amnesiacs and forget gazing up between her legs and handling her there. All that handling, which it turns out is the most appalling thing about pregnancy, worse than the weepiness, worse than the early nausea, the later ballooning.

  But also this: a teary elation when the birthing’s done and there’s the baby, amazing and bloody, her face a little mashed, her cry thin and weird, a seven-pound girl with a cap of brown hair. There is a moment of wonder larger than Sadie had imagined herself capable of: stunning to hold the dark-haired mashed-face baby, whose toes are in fact even more perfect than Delia’s son’s. The nurses refer to her as Baby Feldstein, but her name is Margo, a new and not a family name, Rebecca for the second name: Bill accepts Sadie’s decision because the baby is not a boy. He appears in the delivery room after they’ve cleaned up the baby but not Sadie, and kisses Sadie’s sweaty face and rhapsodizes. When he holds the baby, he is not awkward. It’s as if he has been practicing in secret.

  Sadie feels a high-strung euphoria that skids off into exhaustion and overwrought tears and back again, and she finds herself drifting away and returning. Time becomes slippery and strange, she’s disoriented, and the arrival of her relatives pushes her over the brink. She gets a glimpse of Mother Feldstein, and she feels herself still half-goat, ineffectually bleating. Isn’t that her sister-in-law Nora in the hallway? And Bill’s brothers, a parade of olive-skinned, balding dentists?

  Sadie is huffing. “But I need to sleep,” she says.

  “Of course,” Bill says. “You’ve slept only a little. Darling, they won’t be here long.”

  He’s right, she has slept, she’s in another room now, not nearly so bloody—what is happening to time?—and now her father, her father, is dewy-eyed in the hospital room doorway. He walks in and kisses her on the cheek, wipes his eyes and pats her hand. And just behind him is Mother Feldstein, who has apparently informed the staff that Sadie’s own mother is dead and tells a maternity nurse, “Sadie’s like my own daughter.” She also kisses Sadie: she’s teary, exuding that gardenia perfume, and she wants to hold the baby. She asks Sadie about her breasts. Which has to be a tactic, to shock Sadie with talk about nipples and milk—and in front of her father!—so Sadie’s distracted from hold the baby. Not even Sadie has gotten much holding-of-the-baby, the nurses swept Margo off to the nursery—how long ago? How long was she sleeping? And where is that nursery, where is Margo now: the panic spikes and Sadie bites her lip and calls Bill over and says, “Darling, get me the baby.”

  “She’s in the nursery,” he says. “We’ll have her here soon.”

  “Now,” Sadie says and makes bug eyes at Bill until he gets the nurse back.

  This is not full-blown hysteria, though she is breathing rapidly, she’s on the teary side, and she’s stanching an impulse to harm her mother-in-law. The stanching is important. The nurse tells her twenty more minutes and they’ll have the baby back with her, and by the way her sisters have arrived.

  TOTAL STRANGERS—the round nurse named Patricia or the skinny one Doris—hold the baby and Sadie does not mind. But the pudgy, perfumed hands of her mother-in-law frighten her, as if they’ve been dipped in radium. “Like my own daughter,” Mother Feldstein repeats. (And just look what’s become of Nora, a perfectly nice-looking melancholic who has no friends and spends too much time with her mother and Rose Teitelbaum.)

  And now Sadie feels herself falling into a rapid heaving for air, which hurts. Her whole body hurts. She’s fallen into sick, useless, bleating goathood, and in the waiting room and peering into the nursery, somewhere far beyond her room, Jo and Celia skulk. Her father sits beside her patting her hand and murmuring ssshhh with a Yiddish inflection and some indecipherable word attached, her father in his vest and coat, gold pocket watch hanging, the stern mask of his face cracked open to reveal someone yearning and moved, someone she can’t recall meeting, though her mother might have. Her mother who is not in the hallway and not on this earth. Her mother.

  And if Celia touches the baby—then what? Will there be a mark?

  “Darling? Darling?” Bill says. “The baby’s fine, she’ll be back soon.”

  What if Celia doesn’t wash? Though perhaps she’ll lose her way to the maternity ward, she and Jo both. And Sadie’s father is standing now and Bill has taken his place with the hand patting, her father and Mother Feldstein conferring, drifting out to the hall. Sadie is crying. She is not speaking, she is crying, and hates crying around her family and cries anyway, and what about the baby? And the round nurse Patricia brings her in, a tiny howling thing in a fat blanket. Then Sadie’s holding Margo, and the world begins to still. It’s time, Patricia says, to nurse, they can be alone now, and even Bill leaves. And Sadie stops crying long enough to have a lesson in nursing. It’s awkward and there are false starts, her milk not yet in, but at least no audience, just Round Patricia, who claims to have three children. Stunning little squash-faced Margo, such a tiny thing, now not howling at all.

  Not long after they are finished and calm, the baby falling into sleep, Jo is at the door, austere and tight-lipped, and Celia, washed and combed and wearing a yellow dress less frumpy than usual. Celia’s eyes seem to be wet. And then they’re at the side of the bed, Celia smiling, saying “Oh she’s pretty.” Jo says, “What kind of name is Margo?” and Celia says, “A good name.” The nurse Patricia stays. Sadie’s arms do not feel like her own when she lets Celia sit to her left and hold the baby. On her right she clutches Round Patricia’s hand. Celia herself is pretty in the yellow dress, bathed and combed and holding the newborn, Celia’s face pink and open, as if she has never fallen apart, or tried to pull you with her, as if in this world no one falls apart.

  CHAPTER 10

  Goldie

  VENICE BEACH, CALIFORNIA, 1932

  Along the piers the air thickens with spun sugar, and you hear the intermittent sounds of dance bands from the halls and the tinnier music near the amusements; the town is awash in garish attractions, which do not trouble Goldie. She’s surprised to be at ease here, but Venice so loudly announces itself that Goldie is unremarkable. At first glance no one belongs here, not permanently, and the temporary quality comforts her.

  Permanence seems only to be within her body, and she has become denser, less porous, her skin somehow less permeable than it was when she was younger. She is more immutably herself, though she is not certain what this means, only that the town and the coast seem to wash over her instead of inhabit her, that she has been shaped in part by lake weather and eroding city pavement and a house on Lancaster, but only in part. There were the more distant, more porous, early years in the Pale, which was itself a false home but entered her skin nonetheless, a thick sky and days defined by cabbage and worry and ice, and also by family devotion. On her beach walks she is aware of her density as a reversal from those years, when she herself was almost air, her mother live granite. And now there is just Goldie and the sea air. She would like to be made of this California balminess, this salt, this weather; there is relief in it, a lifesaving but shallow relief. She does not know if it will ever deepen, if she will ever be of this coast, but it doesn’t
matter: Venice seems costumed and masked, a town acquired somewhere else.

  She’s done all she can to forget Buffalo, shrinking it so that the landscape seems tiny, a smear on the far periphery of ocean, the Lancaster house a fig-sized shadow. But in small ways it persists, her family floating in a netherworld like a souvenir globe from the Falls, white crystals drifting over the painted torrent, Daniel passing through dreams. She’s most peaceful during the morning walks, after which she reads at the library: later she starts her shift at the restaurant, beyond the noise of the pier, a white-and-blue building with a black-stenciled fish over the entrance, a long patio outside, and inside a balmy airiness. The dining room windows look out on the water—large squares of ocean and sky—and the bar’s heavy polished wood seems to be from a ship. (Yet a ship without crowding or turbulence, just broad tables with candles and the view beyond.)

  A thin, rangy Southerner named Stan runs the kitchen, and when he is angry he is prone not to yelling but to excessive polite-ness; his assistant, Luca, is quick and sad and more likely to swear. The men in the kitchen have stories locked away in them, they are from Elsewhere, and don’t speak much of it, and in this regard are no different from Goldie. They cook thick soups and serve up plates of fish and plates of beef, and drink soda water on ice through the night and pretend it is beer. If it’s a good day, Stan will sing low to himself, songs from the radio, and what he calls campfire songs, which have a twangy yearning to them. On harder days the air seems to pop with the sounds of metal against metal and abrupt chopping and sizzling meat and impatient calls to the kitchen boy, Clark, for more onions or more butter or more minced greens. The cooks are not unkind to her, and when they are happy they flirt in the mildest way by calling her Goldilocks. The other waitresses, Marie and Jocelyn, and the manager Max just call her G or sometimes GeeGee and invite her to drink with them after the shift. In the early evening the tables fill, and the hours of travel between the tables and the kitchen seem to be a kind of train. There are brief moments during dinner service when Marie and Jocelyn, like Goldie, stop and watch the sea and sky from the windows: they too are from somewhere else. But the speed of the job resumes, and the evening busyness makes her forget time until closing, when time again slows, and she sits for a drink. Jocelyn waves her cigarettes as she talks about movie stars and their visits to Venice Beach and the broader subject of Hollywood gossip, and there’s an ease and sense of play in this, a relief in the glitzy surface. Marie prefers to talk about weddings, especially grand ones.