Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Irving started to walk without his feet. Anna saw his upper body move toward her, but his shoes, his white shoes with the red rubber soles, stayed glued to the cement and she saw him go down like a boulder.

  When she opened her eyes the next instant, he was face down on the cement porch and no one even noticed it. Ava was dealing a new hand of cards.

  Irving, rolling on his round belly, was silent. He turned his head slightly to the side, and Anna saw his cracked eye glasses and blood on his forehead.

  “Oh God,” she cried out. “Look over here!”

  Irving whimpered a little and stayed on his face.

  “Oh—help me pick him up, please!” Anna cried. She could not bend down alone because of her osteoporosis and her arthritis and her collapsed vertebrae.

  “We don’t pick anyone up here,” Sadie said from the table. “We each got our own problems. In no time flat we could all land in the hospital.”

  “They fall here every day,” Ida added.

  “How many times has Irving fallen anyway?” Mickey asked, and all the women looked skyward, as if they were figuring.

  Anna couldn’t bear it, to see him gasping and jerking like a beached fish down there, his forehead on cement. She rushed into the lobby and grabbed a cushion from one of the sagging couches. She carried it outside and slid it under Irving’s forehead.

  “Don’t move him,” Ava said. “Something could be broken.”

  “The last time nothing was broken,” Ida said.

  “But the time before, remember, it was his elbow.”

  “This was a softer fall than that one. That time, he stepped out the elevator before it was level. Everyone heard him go down.”

  Anna ran inside again and yelled to the Cuban clerk. “Jesús! Call the doctor, dummy!” He seemed to be counting out colored postcards of the Colby Plaza. He was counting in Spanish.

  Outside again, Anna knelt over Irving. “Irving, can you hear me?” He rocked on his round stomach to answer her. “Are you okay, Irving?” she asked him. “Are you comfortable?”

  “I make a nice living,” he said.

  Anna looked at him, then stood up, shocked.

  “A joke,” he said. Then he spit out a little blood.

  “Jesús!” she yelled into the lobby “Did you call?” The man looked up from the desk, puzzled. It occurred to Anna that he was drunk.

  “Hey,” he said suddenly. “That old guy can’t be on that pillow.” He ran out to the porch and grabbed the cushion from under Irving’s forehead. “If he bleeds on this, Hyman Cohen will blow a fit! These are his new pillows!”

  “Ten years new,” Ava called over to them.

  “Jesús! Come here!” She called him like a dog, slapping her leg. “Help me pick him up this minute!”

  “There’s no hurry,” the Cuban said. “They’ll pick him up when they come.”

  “Who?”

  “The paramedics.”

  “Did you call them?”

  “They have a standing appointment here,” Sadie said from the card table as she lit another cigarette.

  “Go,” Anna said, shoving the Cuban. “Call them!” She watched him till he went in and picked up the phone.

  While they waited, Anna sat down on the steps of the Colby Plaza and maneuvered Irving’s face, still pointing down, into her lap. She stroked the few hairs on the back of his bald head.

  “Don’t worry, Irving darling,” she whispered. “You’ll be fine, this is just a little nothing. We all have days like this. I myself fell in a hole in a parking lot a year ago. I still have a bone spur on my foot from it.”

  Irving was crying.

  “It hurts you somewhere? It hurts a lot?”

  He nodded his head. His weight in her lap felt like the weight of one of her babies. She thought the feeling of taking care had disappeared forever, and now here it was again.

  “Here they come,” Ava announced.

  A shuddering vibration shook the street, and a fire truck pulled up at the curb. Four firemen jumped off; they were wearing black rubber trousers with yellow suspenders.

  “Aah, it’s you again, isn’t it?” one of them said to Irving. Irving was sobbing without restraint now. She could feel his hot tears seep through her dress. She found his hand and squeezed it. He held on very tight.

  “Don’t worry, Irving dear,” she whispered into his ear. “It’s only this life-and-death business we’re having here. Don’t take it seriously.”

  The firemen were turning him over, opening a big black box, taking out rubber tubes, gauze, fancy machines. If the firemen were being the doctors, then were the doctors running up and down ladders putting out fires?

  The paramedics clumped around in their huge rubber boots. “Anything hurt?” they kept asking Irving. “Where does it hurt?”

  “He’s fine,” Ava called from the card table. “The man is made of steel. I warned him, never wear shoes with rubber soles. And I told him, always get up slow, get your balance first. But no, a big shot, he was in a hurry to impress my sister.”

  Anna shot her a look, like the look Ava had shot Anna in 1914.

  “Here comes the ambulance,” one of the firemen said. “Are you going to the hospital with him?” He was addressing Anna.

  “Yes,” Anna said, and at the same instant Ava called out, “No, of course she isn’t going. Let his daughter go.”

  “My daughter never comes,” Irving cried, crushing Anna’s hand now that he was sitting up, propped by the firemen.

  “I’ll come with you,” Anna said. “Don’t worry,”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Ava said. She was finally talking directly to Anna, paying her the attention that she hadn’t given in the whole visit, pulling her up by the arm. “You’ll have to wait there seven hours. That’s how long they make you wait in Emergency. It’s stacked to the ceiling with old people who fell down.”

  “I have time,” Anna said.

  “No you don’t,” Ava said. “The cab is here,”

  Anna had forgotten entirely. The Red Top. The airport. The plane. LA. Her pianos with the shrouded keys.

  “Take her suitcase,” Ava instructed the driver who had come up onto the porch and was staring, open-mouthed, at Irving. Ava pushed Anna toward the steps. Her mink’s head, slithering on her shoulder, showed its tiny razor-sharp teeth.

  “Take her to the airport,” Ava instructed the cab driver. “And you…,” she said to the ambulance driver, “you get going and take him to the hospital.”

  Irving reached out to Anna, and Anna reached for Irving. But the forces were too strong, the time was too late. They were too powerless. Two minutes later they were rushing in opposite directions—she could feel the wind tearing them apart, the seagulls were going every which way over the ocean—and Anna couldn’t tell if the sirens she heard were approaching or receding.

  STARRY NIGHT

  Looking out the window of the bus, Anna could see a pandemonium of gold and glitter—the whole world rushing around crazily, buying presents. On Wilshire Boulevard, people were stabbing each other with the sharp edges of their packages. Christmas season was a mean season—fat Santa Clauses ringing their bells in everyone’s faces, carols blasting out of loudspeakers, “Let-Us-Adore-Him” and “Christ-the-Lord” in every song. Christmas was a terrible imposition on the Jews. Anna, who had no use for rituals, had made it a special point all her life to ignore Christmas. She left the radio off, didn’t venture out, read only the newspaper’s front page, which had no ads. Long ago she had told her children, “No presents for me. All I want from you is that you should be happy.” Her youngest daughter was a suicide’s widow and had health problems; her oldest girl had money troubles. The truth was she should have allowed them to give her store-bought presents. With her fancy rules, they could give her nothing.

  Now, two days away from Christmas, she was on her way to the doctor’s. All the old people on the bus seemed lame or asthmatic; they were probably all going to the doctor’s, and, like her, they we
re going alone. What could she expect from a world in which a woman of seventy-eight had to take three buses by herself to visit a doctor? At least, in the old days, doctors had made house calls.

  An old man was making his way up the aisle, stopping beside each seat. He swayed beside Anna as if he might land in her lap. He was unshaven and wearing a tattered coat. Thrusting his fist under Anna’s nose, he offered her a choice of red-striped candy canes. She turned her head sharply, dismissing him. He had probably put cyanide in them. He bent closer, shaking the cellophane bouquet beside her ear until she locked eyes with him and willed him away.

  Well, soon she would be done with Christmases and all the rest of it. How long? She couldn’t guess. The years no longer had any definition—one year was like the snap of a finger, no time at all, a mere one seventy-eighth of her life, almost too small a space to count. When she had first learned to play the piano, at seven, a year had been one seventh of her life. To get from her dull Hanon exercises to her first Chopin nocturne had been an eternity of scales, chords, harmony exercises; endless afternoons of winding her metronome and letting its upright brass ticker measure out the practice hours, the beats, the notes that carried her like tiny black birds, away from the raucous life on the lower east side of New York, and later from the wastes of Brooklyn.

  Now Anna had trouble with her eyes: the birds waiting on the staff, as if poised on telephone wires, were bunched erratically, blurred together, bumping one another as they waited for her signal. She had trouble with her fingers, too: when the birds began to fly they became lost in black, dense clouds, their delicate shapes concealed, their formations blotted. Her trills, once absolute bells of clarity, sounded now like the rumble of the “el” thundering by when she was a little girl.

  A tremendous blast caused Anna to jump halfway out of her seat. A black boy carrying a radio as big as a house had just turned up the volume, and “Silent Night” was coming at her like the open palm of her father’s hand. Automatically she pressed her lips together and held her breath. Her father was dead sixty years and he could still do this to her! Though he had been out of Poland eight years when she entered the public schools of New York, he had stubbornly forbidden her to sing Christmas carols with the other children. She was allowed only to move her lips during the school’s Christmas performances on such phrases as “round yon virgin” and “holy infant.” He had instructed her, fiercely, with his hand held up and ready to smack, to weld her lips shut, to be certain that not a flicker of her breath passed through her vocal cords when the forbidden phrase “Christ the Lord” came up. He had been like a madman on the subject, though in most other ways he was a kind and reasonable man.

  Anna noticed suddenly that all the old people on the bus were now sucking on red candy canes. They looked like a gathering of lunatics. All of them on their way to their doctors, or to nowhere. Being alive was such a commotion and took so much effort. Why shouldn’t they suck on something sweet? What better was there to do?

  “So I have a joke for you, Mrs. Goldman,” said Dr. Rifkin, her eye doctor, as soon as he walked into the examining room. Silver tinsel hung from the rubber plant against the wall, and the doctor had a little red-and-green Christmas wreath pinned to his white coat. “Four Yiddishe mamas get together to play cards.” He motioned Anna into the chair where he would tell her how fast she was going blind. He was tall, homely, and overweight. If her daughters had married doctors, they wouldn’t be having health problems and money problems.

  “The first lady says, ‘Oy.’ The second one says, ‘Oy vey.’ The third one says, ‘Oy vey is mir.’ The fourth one says, “Ladies, ladies! We promised we wouldn’t talk about our children!’ “

  Dr. Rifkin laughed loudly at his joke and motioned for Anna to put her chin in the cup. Anna flinched at his deep laughter. She wasn’t in that class of women, she resented being thought of as a Yiddishe mama and she never played cards.

  “So how is life treating you, Mrs. Goldman?” the doctor asked, turning wheels on his machine.

  “I don’t see well and my fingers don’t move where I want them to when I play my Mozart sonatas,” she said pointedly.

  “Then you’re extra lucky to be Jewish. You know why?” he asked, holding the eye dropper right over her head. “You can always play on the keys with your nose!”

  Anna frowned, letting the numbing drops freeze the surface of her eyes. He darkened the room, and a burning blue light materialized in front of Anna’s face. She stared into the heart of it, feeling it burn into her mind. The doctor’s head loomed an inch away. Not since Abram’s death, except for these visits to Dr. Rifkin, had she felt a man’s breath or heard his heavy breathing. When the measurements were taken and the lights turned on—with the doctor again a safe distance away—she steadied herself. It was her opportunity to introduce a new subject.

  “Doctor—how often do you think my daughters should have their eyes examined now that I have this condition?” Anna could never ask doctors enough questions, and they never gave her satisfactory answers.

  “Oh—once every year or so.”

  “Not more often?”

  “If they want to go more often—sure.”

  “Shouldn’t they go every six months, so if this same problem turns up due to bad heredity, they won’t go blind?”

  “Mrs. Goldman,” said Dr. Rifkin, “what’s the difference between a Jewish mother and a vulture?”

  “I have no idea,” Anna said coldly.

  “A vulture only eats hearts after they’re dead. A Jewish mother eats her heart out all her life.”

  The Christmas tree in the waiting room was broken out in an epidemic of angels; around its fake moss base, empty gift-wrapped boxes were piled. A curly-haired little boy of about four shook each box and then sadly set it down. Anna sat across the room from his parents with her heart pounding. She was to have laser surgery in half an hour. “Your intraocular pressure is way up,” Dr. Rifkin had told her. “Not much point in depending on the drops any longer. I’d usually schedule you for another day, but I’m going away for a couple of weeks and we should nip this in the bud. If you can wait till I’m done with my next patient, I’ll tell Sally to get things ready, and we’ll get this over with. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t take long, you shouldn’t have much pain afterward, just a little irritation.”

  “How do you do it?” Anna had asked. “I’ve heard it’s done without knives, without anesthesia.”

  “You want me to tell you everything I learned in medical school in two minutes?”

  “I just want to know something about what to expect.”

  “It’s magic,” said Dr. Rifkin, patting her rudely on the arm. “Don’t worry about it. Don’t you think I know my stuff?”

  The receptionist had asked Anna to sign a release, so if she died it was no one’s fault. The procedure was going to cost a thousand dollars. No wonder the doctor could tell jokes all day. She hoped Medicare would pay some of it. In a few minutes she would be taking part in a magic trick. A vulture would be pulled from her heart, pluck out her eyes, and replace in their sockets two cold blue marbles. A man in a black cape would saw her body in half.

  “Do you have a candy cane for me?” the little boy said, coming to Anna and putting his hand on her knee.

  “Donny, come back here and don’t bother the lady. Not everyone gives out candy canes.”

  “It’s okay,” Anna said, regretting her suspicions on the bus. “I have grandchildren. I wish I had a candy cane to give him. He’s a sweet boy.” Anna wondered what was wrong with him; glued in the middle of his forehead, like a great eye, was a silver snap. The boy touched it.

  “Don’t wrinkle the lady’s skirt. Behave yourself,” the boy’s mother said. His father added, “Don’t touch your electrode.” The parents were young, and looked terrified. She knew they weren’t from Beverly Hills. Anna didn’t dare ask them what she wanted to know. Is your boy going blind? Does he have a brain tumor? Something worse? The boy had climbed on the couch
beside Anna and wiggled his bottom against the backrest. His hand on her thigh was warm through her skirt. The boy’s mother, sitting across the room with the father, said apologetically, “He probably thinks you’re going to read to him. His grandmother always reads to him. You look a little like her…my mother.”

  Anna felt the boy’s warmth all down her side. His head brushed against her arm. She could smell his talcum powder, which reminded her of her own sweet babies, of that vanished other life. “I have nothing to read to him, but I can draw him a picture.”

  “Oh, he’d love that. Donny, come here and give the nice lady your colored pencils. She’ll draw a picture for you.”

  The boy scrambled off the couch and ran across the room for the little flat box of pencils and a pad of paper. “I always come prepared,” the mother explained. “We have to wait for hours sometimes.”

  “Where are you from?” Anna asked.

  “Nevada.”

  “That’s a long way,” Anna acknowledged.

  “We don’t mind coming far,” the father said. “We would go farther. We would go anywhere.”

  “Wherever the experts are,” the mother explained.

  “Well, Donny—I only know how to draw one picture.” Anna said. “I’m a one-picture artist. I used to draw a picture for my little girls. Shall I draw it for you?”

  The child nodded his head energetically. The electrode mirrored the artificial candles flashing on the tree and sent bursts of red light into Anna’s sensitive eyes. She took the boy’s warm little hand and held onto it for a minute.

  “Well, now, here we go.”

  On the tablet she drew in pink the heart-shaped face of a girl. “Let’s call her Wendy,” Anna said. With the yellow pencil, she gave Wendy tight corkscrew curls and wavy bangs. Her eyelashes, done in black feathery strokes, were long and demure. Her mouth was a little strawberry rosebud.