The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “Jo,” her father says. “You know Eli Abramowitz?”

  “Eli who was just here.”

  “Eli has asked my permission to court you.”

  “What?”

  “Eli has asked my permission to take you on a date,” Abe says, his expression inscrutable, a careful mask. “I have given him my permission.”

  “I see,” Jo says, though she doesn’t see at all. In the navy blue suit she looks like a stuffed, aging seal. Too old for children. Why would Eli Abramowitz or anyone else court her? If he needs a housekeeper, he can hire one. What else could he possibly want? No, she doesn’t see. She hasn’t since high school hoped for men to see anything in her: she is bored by their company, alarmed by their proximity. They gradually learned to stay away, her last few dates all in the years before her mother’s illness. And she is not seeking this attention—adamantly not—from Eli the grocer or any other man.

  “You mind the store,” her father says. “I’ve got to finish the Rosenblum ring.”

  He moves slowly and in the doorway appears to her an old man; she glances away. Automobiles skid along Main Street, one lurching into a snowbank. What does she seek? The question draws a dizzy blank. Nothing? How can the answer be nothing? She wants years back. But here and now? She wanted an automobile and she got one, and in the warmer weather there’s pleasure in driving it. Often she wants candy, pastry, pie. She wants the store to remain solid and intact. She wants her father to stop listening to the war, it’s doing him no good, just look at him. She wants Celia to stay calm. But none of this seems exactly right. What then? There’s the other kind of seeking, of course, private, beyond the divide of daily life, the kind you don’t tell Eli Abramowitz or anyone else about. Seeking, say, a plane. Amelia and her plane and her island. Imagining yourself in the cockpit of a plane flying over a vast ocean and bearing down on a string of islands, choosing one island for no other reason than the feeling it gives you, as if it in particular is watching you, waiting for you, and the feeling turns out to be right. Amelia’s there alone, glad for the company. She’s relieved that it’s Jo, gratified and a little amazed that of all people, Jo’s the one to find her. Jo whom Amelia has heard of, has wondered about. It could have been a navy pilot finding her, or worse. The navy has some real buffoons. Isn’t, for example, Jo’s brother in the navy?

  Army, Jo confesses.

  Army then, Amelia says. Would you count on him to rescue you? To rescue anyone?

  He hasn’t been helpful so far, Jo says.

  Precisely my point. But here you are, Amelia says. We have plans to make.

  And in haste too—they can’t stay on this island long, the Enemy will find them. Jo’s exhausted, but Amelia is rested and ready to fly. They set out for Hawaii. And the world drops away, it’s just the two of them in the sky, and then the two of them on the famous shores of Hawaii, where they have meals of sweet fish and fruit, and rest in the sun the way Jo and her sisters used to at Crystal Beach.

  It has been a long time since Jo lay in the sun anywhere. Once, months after Goldie disappeared, she drove east alone, to the meadows and farms just after harvest, the stripped-down corn-stalks gold stubble in the fields, the grasses still high. An autumn warm spell. And she lay in the grass and slept there and awakened for a brief few minutes to another life, made of grass and sun and crickets and the warm melting feeling of her body after sleep, a pure contentment. And she paid attention for once to the grass itself, its lightness and height, the way the red-and-gold-flecked green seemed to hold all possibilities within it, all in arm’s reach, there for the taking. The meadow seemed open to her as no place and no person was; and Jo herself had never felt such unlonely openness, one miraculous instant of knowing, before it seemed intolerable. Before she had to close her eyes, trying to fix it in her mind, though it could not be fixed. Perhaps it had moved to another point in the meadow; or to a nearby grove of trees; and so she rose and looked beyond the meadow to the roads and farm-houses, the tractors, the masses of clouds moving fast from the west and north; and then noticed the thin cloth of her shoes, the surprising smallness of her wrists—which have since thickened as all of her has thickened—and the moment had already dispersed. In a nearby pasture, cows grazed careless of her, simply standing and grazing, cows for the moment free of the farmers and the barn and the drudgery of milk.

  BY MIDAFTERNOON the sky has clouded again. More snow. When the mailman arrives, her father glances through the stack of envelopes and hands it over to Jo to sort, as is his habit. Today, there is nothing personal or hastily handwritten, nothing from out of state. She opens and dates the invoices, prepares a bank deposit, calls the travel agent with dates for her father’s next buying trip. And just as she’s readying to leave, to find a bus home and start dinner, he tells her, “Jo, stay to closing today. Celia can fix the supper, yes?” Which in fact she can, Celia’s a better cook than she lets on, she just doesn’t stay with it long enough: the problem is planning and cooking consecutive meals. It’s hard to know if this is deliberate or not, but you can’t blame Celia for dodging the chore.

  “Fine, then.” Jo takes off her coat and begins to plan the February display: rubies, garnets, diamonds, pearls arranged on red and white satin hearts.

  Just before closing, Eli Abramowitz returns. The same overcoat, the same hat, but different gloves now, gentlemen’s gloves, and below his coat a suit. Jo is counting garnet earrings, marking down the number and size on her notepad while Eli hovers on the far side of the display case. She would like to hide beneath the case, in the storage area for gift boxes and wrapping and register receipts, though only a small child would fit, and of course there’s no avoiding Eli now. She is lumpy and awkward, her face hot. Eli waits in his good clothes, holding his hat, finally saying, “Hi, Jo.”

  And Jo says, stupidly, “Hi.”

  “Would you like to go to the pictures with me?” One earnest, baritone sentence.

  And when she hesitates, he says, “I asked your father’s permission,” as if to reassure her. Eli Abramowitz, who is pink-cheeked from the cold and standing by the garnets, breathes like an ordinary person, but maybe an intent ordinary person. Her own breathing seems to have a different rhythm, faster, unsyncopated, it’s hard to keep track of both rhythms at once, but she listens, closes a fist around an earring, smooth and sharp against her palm. She pictures the interior of Shea’s Theatre, the gilded boxes and gold-framed murals, the vast dome and the velvet curtains, and the way the darkness comes upon you gradually, and the screen fills with the exquisite faces of women.

  “All right.” The words coming to her of their own accord, altering this strange breathing moment.

  Eli smiles and allows his hand to rest on top of the jewelry case. “Tomorrow?”

  “SO YOU TALKED to Eli,” her father says. They are in his Ford, navigating the uneven, snow-slick street. Traffic noise surrounds them but he has turned off the radio, freeing them for the moment from the war.

  And Jo feels the heat in her face again, the wish to disappear. “Yes,” she says, but nothing more, and he glances at her and back at the street. Beyond the windshield the air is dense with new snow, and the wipers scrape against the glass, where a line of ice accumulates and frames Ferry Street, then Delaware. He does not turn the radio back on, and instead drives with her in a silence that is neither hostile nor revealing, a plain silence spread over the fact of Eli.

  When they enter the house, before he has hung up his overcoat, her father turns on the radio in the parlor, and stands listening to the hourly broadcast and asks nothing more.

  Celia’s at the kitchen table reading the funnies. She’s still dressed for the Red Cross—a wool skirt and sweater, her hair pinned back with barrettes. “Busy today, I guess,” Celia says. She’s warmed the cold brisket, roasted potatoes, boiled red cabbage. Nothing in the kitchen is amiss: if only you could count on her every day. But she cooks only on a lark, or as a favor granted when the mood strikes.

  “Busy, yes,”
Jo says and stirs the cabbage for the sake of stirring.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine,” Jo says. All fine here. “A little distracted.”

  And Celia draws close, confiding, pulling her blue sweater tight and tapping Jo on the shoulder. “When Irving comes back you won’t have to work at the store,” she whispers.

  The air pops with bits of a radio report from London, there’s a sweet-savory smell to the meat, and Jo rubs her hands together: it’s impossible to keep her hands warm. She’s hardly thought of Irving today, except as a betrayer. Not the Irving Celia’s invoking—Irving at boot camp, soon to cross one or another violent ocean. “You’re right,” Jo says. And Celia returns to the funnies.

  She’ll talk about Eli Abramowitz later, Jo decides. After supper, when their father has finished his tea and left for his room or Lillian the Tart’s. Later would be best. Jo will be nonchalant. By the way, she’ll say, as Sadie would. By the way, I’ll be out tomorrow evening. Eli—you know Eli from the market? Eli asked me to the pictures with him, so I’ll be out a while.

  Jo silently practices the phrasing while she rinses a water pitcher, and then the silence gives way—some mumbling leaks out—and Celia says, “You seem odd today.”

  “A little distracted.”

  “You said.”

  “By the way,” Jo says.

  “What?”

  “I’ll be out tomorrow.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Eli Abramowitz asked me to the pictures.”

  “Eli?”

  “You know, from the market.”

  “I know Eli.” Celia turns back to the funnies, and after a moment rises and carries them to the parlor, where their father dozes in his armchair in his overcoat. Celia curls up on the sofa and fixes her gaze on him.

  Jo follows only as far as the parlor door. “Don’t you want dinner?”

  “No,” Celia says.

  Jo shrugs, takes her dinner in the kitchen, and slips away to her room without saying good night to anyone.

  In the morning there’s an unsigned note on the kitchen table in Celia’s hand: Unfortunately, I will be unavailable for dinner this evening.

  THE IDEA of going to the pictures with Eli is separate from Eli the grocer. An anxious thing, an absurd thing. At work, Jo can’t decide what she’ll wear. Perhaps the green wool dress, though with all the snow, there’s no avoiding her heavy, graceless boots. Sadie’s are sleeker: everything about Sadie is sleeker, even the way she thinks, no doubt she married to keep up that sleekness. No, Jo’s boots are clunky and solid and unmarried, and don’t match the green dress. They ought to. But Jo can’t feign sleekness; everyone knows that. Surely Eli the grocer knows that. And what if he finds her boots absurd? She’s aware of the strangeness of feet: she doesn’t want Eli thinking about her feet, and she doesn’t want to consider his man’s feet, the broadness or narrowness of his toes, the smoothness or sprinkling of hair. No. Forget about feet. Forget about boots. Amelia wouldn’t worry about boots. It’s winter: one must wear boots. Jo is ridiculous, and she hates being ridiculous, how irritating to find oneself in this state. She has no wish for a man. She is no good at soothing, particularly the soothing of men, she has never wanted a husband, has never understood those women who want husbands, and give themselves over to husbands, like Sadie, like Lucia Mazzano.

  Just before the war, Jo glimpsed Lucia Mazzano on the street, pregnant, no longer Lucia Mazzano but instead Lucia Santora, married to that Anthony. Lucia at first alone on Main Street, and then holding the hand of a three- or four-year-old girl, and walking with her own mother, the keeper of the saints. A picture unraveling out in the street in which you witness dry-eyed what your life is not. A scene of the mother attending to the daughter who attends to the daughter. Jo could envision herself nowhere. Jo would never be pregnant, not a chance, but if she were a man she would marry and make her wife pregnant. She’d do it, she would. And there on Main Street she felt a wild fluttering at the thought of taking her wife in such a way, a thrill sustainable for the briefest moment before Lucia and her mother and the girl stopped at a shoe store and Lucia pushed open the door. Lucia, who was fat with Anthony’s child, had let herself be touched in that way by Anthony, which was too much to bear. More little Anthonys running around Buffalo, little dagos, Jo thought, the word surfacing as Lucia disappeared from view, and Jo stared across Main Street, willing Lucia both to return and to vanish forever. After a moment Jo’s list of errands reasserted itself and she moved on with her morning. And now she rarely thinks of Lucia Mazzano, though that word sometimes hovers, two steps from dog. Once Jo said it on the phone to Sadie, and Sadie cut her off, saying “Hush,” a rough, commanding “Hush,” nothing like the soothing one Sadie offers other people.

  Did Jo ever shop with her mother? She had only the smallest part in her mother’s life, can hardly remember the two of them alone, though some mornings, even now, she has the fleeting impression that she might walk down to the kitchen and find her mother awake, drinking tea at the table, as she had once done. A slight smile. Her mother could put her finger to her lips and motion for Jo to pour herself a cup from the white-and-blue teapot. They could sip the hot tea while light fills the yard—the sky rimmed with pink and yellow, snow turning from blue to white. This must have occurred, but mostly Jo remembers the chaos of breakfast, her mother speaking with exaggerated patience to Celia.

  FOR HALF the morning Jo works on the store’s Valentine’s Day advertisement, which this year will have hearts but not cupids. Idiotic, cupids. She tells the ad man at the Courier, no cupids. Because of the war, she says, hearts but not cupids.

  Business is light. She checks and rechecks her father’s ledgers, staving off the moment when the building molts and the walls thin. But the black ink numbers seem to sink into the ledger pages, a corrosive patterning, and the wind gusts whip fallen snow upward outside the store, and the radio’s bright piano music mocks the day. At ten-thirty Jo calls Sadie, but it isn’t Sadie who answers the phone, it’s that Rosalie, and Jo hangs up.

  Unfortunately, I will be unavailable for dinner. Celia and her note, taking a lesson from Goldie. An unwitting conspiracy—or perhaps more deliberate? Unfortunately, I will be in California. Where all is fine. Where Jo is smaller than an afterthought, so distant as to be invisible. Is that what Celia wants today? What Goldie chose: to make Jo invisible, to keep her invisible, Goldie never once writing to say I am not dead. Never offering an explanation or apology, never asking forgiveness, as if there is nothing to explain or forgive, as if Jo’s forgiveness is dust, Jo herself dust. Jo can see no recourse with Goldie (the thief). From Celia she deserves better. Celia with her Red Cross and her clean clothes and her combed hair: for now she is washing, for now she is fine and Jo gets to be dust.

  BUT ELI, the real Eli, does not treat her like dust. He picks her up at the house in a Chevrolet much newer than his truck, and he is dressed in a jacket and tie, just for the pictures a jacket and tie. He leads her through the snow, opens doors for her. He suggests The Palm Beach Story, which takes place in Florida. With all the snow wouldn’t it be nice to be in Florida? Eli says.

  “Much better than California.” Jo tells him she often day-dreams about beaches.

  In the dark theater Eli sits beside her, straight-backed and attentive, and halfway through the film she is startled to discover his hand on hers, his shy glance. His hand is large and warm and doughy, not unpleasant really, and she does not pull away. Through the rest of the film they hold hands, which is partly pleasurable and partly unnerving. They are still holding hands at the end of the film, when the house lights come up: how does one stop such a thing? Isn’t the man supposed to stop? She’s relieved to put on her coat. And then Eli drives her home. “Thank you, Eli,” she says. “Thank you for the evening.” He makes a gesture to walk her to the door, leans slightly in her direction, but she wishes him good night and hurries out of the Chevy and up to the quiet house.

  Her father’s Ford is gone,
which means he’s with the Tart. The kitchen is clean, and there is no additional note. Upstairs, Celia’s asleep. Jo washes and changes into her nightgown and climbs into bed, where she stays awake to the hush of falling snow, something palpable, that hush, like sound being drained from the city. The flannel of her nightgown rubs against her skin when she moves, there are low electric sparks along her belly and legs, and she thinks of yachts from the movie and Eli Abramowitz’s hand, that warm hand running along her arm and under her nightgown. But then there’s a wave of queasiness, his hand—its irrefutable fleshiness—too much to imagine, and she tries to banish the image from her mind, wrapping the gown closer around herself, pulling the pile of blankets up, so the bed is its usual warm cocoon. She thinks of the woman in the movie traveling to Florida to change her life, and the preponderance of men in Florida. Perhaps it is different in Hawaii; perhaps the men are all on battleships, readying for combat. Pacific islands will be shelled, though not Amelia’s, and not any island Irving is on, he’s in Georgia, not on an island, at least not now. In Georgia it may be snowing tonight—there’s enough snow here to drift southward on the map, to pile up in Georgia as well, isn’t there?—endless snow, January is like this. Eli wanted to walk her to the door. Held her hand again in his car, before she left without kissing him—was she supposed to kiss him? Or let him kiss her. The oddness of kissing through a beard she cannot imagine, but his hands she can imagine, they are real and what if those hands were to touch her, to move over her, those grocer’s hands, if she let him do that, then what? She does not know, but imagines his hand moving over her, moving down between her legs, and the feeling is a wild open blueness and a kind of racing, and there’s the snow hush and the hotness of the bed, the heat of a summer sky, heat of a blue sky, and a swaying dampness, as if she herself were in the Pacific. A kind of flight, and the face of Amelia, in close-up like Claudette Colbert, but it’s not Claudette, it’s Amelia, and you have to take her when she is so close, take her before she fades out, before the swooning ends, such swooning and heat, dizzy circles blurring and blurring and blurring, a drop into pure cloud.