Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “Call 911! Call 911!” he yelled to Anna. That, too, from the movies. Last weekend Carol had rented Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Thank God for Hollywood. She pulled the wet child with her into the house and called 911.

  When Carol and Abram came home, Anna and David were under a Charlie Brown quilt on the couch, watching a movie called Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. David was in dry clothes and Anna was holding his hand; she was surprised at how huge it was, almost a man’s hand. In the movie some daffy guy with a beanie on his head kept pedalling his bike backwards. David laughed everytime Pee Wee made a funny face, and when his body vibrated against Anna’s chest, she laughed too.

  “Should I tell them now?” David whispered into Anna’s ear.

  “Wait a few minutes. Let your mother get her breath.” She touched David’s face gently. His eyelashes had been singed off, but that was all. The paramedic had told Anna he would be fine. By some miracle, the Angel of Death had passed over the house like a silver jet.

  But if it hadn’t been Chanukah, David wouldn’t have taken a candle out into the yard. If there hadn’t been a can of charcoal lighter at the fence, he wouldn’t have stood on it. If it hadn’t tipped over, the cap wouldn’t have come off. If the hot wax hadn’t dripped down and ignited the charcoal lighter…

  Well, never mind. If Anna had been born a Russian princess! If the world were square! If God were a kind man with a long beard!

  Carol was busy in the kitchen unpacking bags of groceries. “I just stopped off to get a few more things we need,” she called to her mother. Abram was standing by, yelling “Neato” every time she unpacked an item that pleased him: a six-pack of Pepsi; frozen burritos; chocolate mint cream pie. When she pulled out bags of carrots, oranges, broccoli, he rolled his eyes and said, “Retch,” accompanied by sound effects. Anna noticed that he was wearing new white tennis shoes after all. They had orange lightning bolts on them.

  “Hey, David,” Abram yelled into the dimness of the TV room. “Mom let me rent Ghostbusters again.”

  “Rad,” David said, a little weakly. “Really rad.”

  “And we got another Heavenly Hash ice cream.”

  “Could we please have some over here before it’s all gone?” Anna asked immediately. “With whipped cream if possible.”

  “Your wish is my command,” Abram said. He danced around under the kitchen light like a boxer in his new shoes.

  “But don’t bring it to us yet. You help your mother unpack first,” Anna said.

  “And then we have something to tell you,” David added. “It’ll blow your mind.”

  THE LEAF LADY

  The Leaf Lady was swirling her broom around on the cracked cement; no matter when Anna came up Granger Street, pulling her despised cart behind her, she saw the same angry woman, dressed in a blue bathrobe, jerking her yellow broom from side to side and daring the universe to dirty her sidewalk. Anna had no doubt that she was a landlady, probably as bad as her own.

  A leaf came down. The Leaf Lady pounced, attacked it with a flurry of broomstraws, shunted it into her dustpan, delivered it triumphantly into her silver trash bag. Then she planted her feet apart, looked up, and waited for another to come down from the stunted, anemic tree.

  Old ladies like this one gave a bad name to all old ladies. If Anna could be bumping along the street shaped like a beachchair or a candlestick or a rye bread, she would definitely prefer it to looking like this white-haired object in whose form she was housed. She glanced in the window of a car and winced at her reflection. Typical. The rounded shoulders, the delicate jowls, the fallen, sunken, loose skin of the face, the watery eyes. Even the ears on old people got huge, stretched out, as if to remind the world to speak up—more was needed, more of everything, if the old were to receive even a tiny bit of what used to be their due.

  There was no point in trying to hide her age like some of the women at the Center did, with their platinum hairdos and their red-white-and-blue makeup. Besides, little things gave them away. In one second their stooped backs and their wire carts on wheels told the whole predictable story: osteoporosis and a dead husband. An army of women like Anna walked the streets. Who needed names or histories? You could guess a hundred life-stories and be right ninety-nine times: the one-room apartment, enough money in the bank to make up what Social Security didn’t pay for, the big-shot children (at the Center, where Anna ate lunch every day, “movie producer” was the favorite; doctors, lawyers—they weren’t so impressive any more).

  Anna sighed with regret. In that department she was sorely lacking—her youngest daughter, Carol, was the widow of a lunatic who had killed himself (thank God, at least, for that) and her oldest, Janet, was married to a professor. Neither of her children was ever going to provide Anna with the key to a fancy condominium with soundproof walls. This was her heart’s desire: to live in a place with no Armenians, no Russians, no gays, no babies, no aspiring musicians, no noises, no smells. And no landladies.

  She dragged her cart down the curb and was nearly run down by a Mexican speeding by in an ancient red truck. And no Mexicans, she added. A warning flag flashed in her mind. These conveniences she wished for she would find soon enough in a hole in the ground. And for much cheaper than in a condominium. She shouldn’t wish for something she wasn’t ready for. Bernie, at the Center, warned everyone he met: “Don’t have fancy wishes—God might make them come true.”

  God was a subject she wasn’t going to get into now. She had to remember her shopping list. Although she wasn’t superstitious—she didn’t go hopping right now over to some tree to knock on wood that she had a good heart; she didn’t spit to ward off the Evil Eye—she said aloud for the record, “For a hole in the ground I can wait a while.”

  She pulled her cart up the side of the far curb, grudgingly grateful that she had crossed Santa Monica Boulevard again and was still in one piece. Accidents were the foe of old women. One day you were on your two feet, the next day you were in traction in a hospital room with some big-mouth who wouldn’t shut up for five minutes.

  Feeling she had crossed a wide, dangerous river, Anna glanced back across the street and saw the Leaf Lady watching her. She stared back. The old witch shook the top of her broom at her. She made shapes with her mouth. Anna guessed she was cursing and was not surprised. Everyone was crazy, and you couldn’t make a friend in this world even if you wanted to.

  In the Alpha Beta she got her coupons ready. Her fingers trembled as she put the flimsy bits of newspaper in order. Twelve cents off on orange juice, twenty-five cents off on a dozen eggs, fifty cents off on a pound of bacon. Nevermind that her sister Gert was outraged by Anna’s fondness for bacon; when the Messiah came down personally to Anna and gave her one good reason why Abram had died so young, and apologized, then maybe she would consider giving up bacon. In the meantime she would eat what she liked.

  She hooked her cart to the wire edge of the store’s shopping wagon and began to push. The rubber wheels jammed and the steel bar caught Anna just under her breasts. The air went out of her. She stopped to wait for the pain to recede, and, as she stood there, a wagon crashed into her ankles. She cried out and spun around. A woman wearing a purple turban and a flowered pantsuit said, “Honey, this is no place to stand around daydreaming. This is heavy traffic

  “You should watch where you’re going!”

  “And you should go back to Russia where you belong!” the woman said, brandishing an armful of gold bracelets at Anna.

  Russia! To be mistaken for a foreigner when she had been born in America!

  “Oh go to hell,” Anna said.

  She gave a push on her wagon and got herself into the aisle with coffee and tea. Now came the business of comparing prices. She wasn’t going to let them take her for a fool. One brand of coffee was eighteen-and-a-half cents an ounce, another was twenty-two cents an ounce. She would be here all morning if she had to, making calculations, but it was necessary.

  She never even drank a whole cup of coffee. She made i
t for the warmth, for the smell, for the way the steam penetrated the china cup and heated her fingers. She always put in sugar and cream and let the aroma warm her cold face in the morning. She allowed herself this indulgence: to remember Abram every morning, the way he had enjoyed his breakfast, the two sunnyside-up eggs she fried for him, like happy eyes on his plate; how he wolfed down his toast, gulped his coffee. His appetites had been huge and wonderful.

  She glanced up and thought she was having a stroke. Abram stood right next to her, as he would have looked if he’d grown old. He was in baggy gray pants, peering at boxes of teabags on the shelf next to the coffee. Oh—but he looked pathetic; his stretched-out brown sweater was pilled and stained, his shoes were scuffed and dusty, his wavy hair ragged. But he had the same hairline, the same bushy, down-slanted eyebrows, the crinkles around the good-natured eyes. Anna felt her heart skip and realized she had stopped breathing.

  A miracle. Maybe she wouldn’t buy bacon. She set her coupons down on the shelf and pretended to be examining a can of coffee. She glanced sideways at the man’s shopping wagon. In it were six cans of Campbell’s tomato soup. God in heaven! Like in her dream! In her dream, Abram was always in a shabby little room somewhere, without her, all alone, bent over his hot plate, heating up a can of tomato soup. There was a telephone in his room, an old black one, sitting like a squashed cross on a rickety wooden table. But in the dream she never knew the number, she could never reach him.

  The man had Abram’s large nose. He was shorter than Abram, but even men lose calcium, their spines shrink. All those years alone, twenty-three years alone in that room. What did he think about there? Her! He must think about Anna and the girls when they were little. Maybe even now, as he peered at the shelves in the Alpha Beta, he was thinking of her, the breakfasts she had made him, the pleasure she had given him. Tears flooded her eyes. I’m all alone, too! I think of you every minute of my life!

  He selected Swee Touch Nee tea, the kind she always used, and she knew this was some kind of visitation. She reached out her hand, almost ready to pluck the sleeve of his sweater, to point herself out to him, but drew it back. The Anna he must remember was a young woman (only in her fifties!), whose face was still smooth, whose breasts (even then!) were like when she was sixteen. He was dreaming of his young wife; she was remembering her young husband, and here they stood, side-by-side, lives like pitchers that were tipped over and only a few drops left inside.

  He took his tea and shuffled off behind his cart. Even the way his pants sank low on his hips was the same as Abram. But he was so shabby, so alone in the world, it broke her heart to see it. She made a sobbing sound and dug in her pocketbook for a handkerchief. She never carried on like this, but she had lost control. He was disappearing around the corner, going to the next aisle. She felt she had to hurry or he would be gone. She pushed hard against her cart, the wheels locked again, she was punched in the chest.

  She sobbed openly as she struggled to push the wagon; it was like moving a mountain up the aisle. She turned the corner, knocking some bags of potato chips off a display. There he was! In front of frozen foods! Holding a pepperoni pizza in his hand, examining the pale, cheesy face of it.

  Abram never ate a pizza in his life! Even when the girls first tasted it in high school, when they wanted the family to go out to dinner and eat it, he scorned it. Dough heavy as lead, he used to say. With cheese and meat mixed together! A horror, a disgusting invention.

  Her senses returned to her. She let him go and turned her wagon the other way. What did she want him for anyway—a filthy old man who ate pizza, who now had an ugly frown on his face?

  Her list, her shopping list. She had been here all this time and had bought nothing and was exhausted already. Her chest ached, the backs of her ankles were scraped. And now…now she had lost her coupons! They were gone, not in her hand, not in her bag, not in her wagon. After she had scrupulously cut them out of the paper this morning, not one of them with a ragged edge so the checkout girl could complain, accuse Anna of sloppiness.

  She began to retrace her steps, looking on the floor for her coupons. She wanted that fifty cents off on bacon. She was going to go home and cook half a pound for her dinner and eat it all at once, piece by piece, knowing it was from a pig, making it clear to God that she knew.

  She found no coupons on the floor of the Alpha Beta. Anna walked slowly around the whole store, looking. She was about to give up when she spied an empty wagon by the bananas, just sitting there, abandoned. And in it were the same three coupons she had lost: for eggs, for bacon, for orange juice. The edges were ragged; someone less careful than she had torn them out of the paper. Whoever owned them must have got disgusted, as she often did. Couldn’t find the juice. Didn’t want to bother. The wagon didn’t work and the person got fed up and walked out.

  To test this assumption, Anna jiggled the wagon and felt the heavy locking of its rubber wheels. There—it was like a dead whale and it didn’t happen just to her. But this person had been smart and just walked out. If more people did that, the Alpha Beta would wake up, oil their wheels.

  She lifted the coupons out of the wagon and arranged them in her hand. She felt lucky. At least she could salvage something from this shopping trip. Maybe today would even turn out to be her lucky day. Maybe she would buy a lottery ticket when she checked out. What would she do with fifty thousand dollars? Buy a Steinway Grand. Buy two. Her spirits were beginning to revive.

  “That’s the woman!” a man yelled behind her just as she was picking up a package of bacon. “She’s the one!” The old man, the Abram who wasn’t Abram, was pointing his finger at her, an inch from her nose, and the woman in the purple turban and flowered pantsuit was running toward her, her face like a tornado.

  “Did you steal my coupons?” she screamed, while the old man was blabbering, spit coming from his lips. “She took them right out of your wagon, I saw her!”

  Anna waved the tattered coupons in the air. “Here! Take them! Who needs them? I thought someone left them there…no one was by the wagon…I had my own coupons, I brought them with me…I lost them.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” the woman said, tearing them from Anna’s fingers. “Thief! I should have them call the police on you.”

  The old man, with his ugly, unfamiliar face, was glaring at her. His eyes were vicious.

  Go eat your pepperoni! Anna thought. Go to hell, all of you.

  She unhooked her little cart from the big wagon and dragged it toward the front of the store. She started out the IN door and it hit her in the face, opening automatically as someone approached it from outside.

  Blindly, she backed away and found the other door, clattered out with her cart, crossed Santa Monica Boulevard. Cars honked and screeched around her. Let them run her over, she’d thank them.

  The Leaf Lady looked up as Anna clanked her empty cart over the curb. She came to stand in the middle of the street, her robe gaping open, holding her broomstick like a spear. She pointed it at Anna’s empty cart. “What’s the matter?” she said. “There’s nothing good enough for you in the whole store?”

  “Oh drop dead,” Anna said. She was crying and couldn’t see where she was going.

  “I wouldn’t do you the favor,” the Leaf Lady said. “Believe me, not even if it was the end of the world.”

  “If it was the end of the world, we’d all be better off,” Anna said, moving right along.

  “Not me,” the Leaf Lady called after her. “I got property all over Venice.”

  “So I own two pianos,” Anna yelled over her shoulder. “And even so, I say we’d be better off!”

  “The kind of music you must play, maybe you’re right!” But Anna wasn’t going to answer such stupidity. She dragged her wagon homeward, watching out for potholes.

  MOZART YOU CAN’T GIVE THEM

  In the downstairs apartment the young Mexican boy began to knock his head against the wall. Sometimes Anna thought it was just the low bass beat of some tenant’s ster
eo, but as soon as she realized it wasn’t regular, she knew it was the boy starting his morning tantrum. At least if he had some sense of rhythm—a little drummer boy. But he wasn’t musical, only crazy. At almost the same instant the Russian lady across the courtyard began playing violent streaks of dissonance on her cello. Immediately Anna pictured a blackboard, wide and colorless as Russia, and across it came the shrieking chalk, an empty train scraping and grinding its way over the bleak plains. The woman should have stayed in Russia where there was more space, and not moved here to live ten feet from Anna and give her a headache every day.

  As if all that weren’t enough, Anna heard the clatter of the barbecue lid being lifted outside, and she rushed to lock her windows. On the tiny balcony next to Anna’s, the father of the Armenian family was lighting the barbecue starter again. What was wrong with these people that they had to cook three times a day over charcoal? Didn’t they know how to use a stove? If they were civil human beings in the first place, she would tell them that this kind of cooking could give them cancer. But when she slammed the sliding glass door shut, the man always sneered at her, looking like a walrus with his hanging mustache, and threw more lighter on the coals, for spite.

  Charred edges of meat, which tasted like heaven itself, could kill you. What couldn’t kill you? Pickled herring could kill you, lox could kill you, everything was full of nitrites. Anna heard plenty of lectures at the Senior Citizens’ Center, she was an informed woman. Chicken fat could kill you, cream cheese, sour cream, bacon; for years these foods had tempted her to stay alive. When her sister Gert had come with her to the Center for the lecture by the nutritionist, bacon had been the day’s main subject. The old man Bernie, who was at the Center all the time, announced that if you drank orange juice when you ate bacon, something in the juice would cancel out the cancer. Gert had poked Anna and muttered, “Jews—all of these Jews—they have no business eating bacon anyway. No business even talking about it!”