Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  But I walked straight to Pearl’s house. I hoped she was not going to be there, although as I walked along, with tears not quite shed, feeling like someone in a play, playing the part of a woman walking along a street, I also did want her to be there. When I reached her building, I ran up the stairs. I felt strong. It didn’t make me lose my breath to run. When Pearl opened the door, I stepped in, and to my own surprise I began hitting her. “I came over,” I said, but as I was speaking, I was swinging my arm in my coat and glove, reaching up at her face. She stood there, shocked, looking down at me. I slapped her, not hard, because something was making my arm heavy so that I could hardly move it, and I couldn’t get any force behind it. The air pressed it back. But after I slapped her I began pummeling at her face and pummeling with my other hand—my pocketbook slid off my wrist—at her arm and her body.

  “Hilda,” she said, and closed the door behind me. I could hear Simon crying somewhere. Pearl didn’t try to stop me. At first my blows were like a baby’s, weak, but then my strength returned and I hit her sides and back. I threw myself at her and hit her shoulders and legs. She backed up and somehow I pushed her down. I was ashamed, but I couldn’t stop. I was sobbing and beating my sister-in-law, still in my gloves, but as hard as I could now, beating her sides and buttocks and legs. I bit her arm through her blouse. I was on top of her.

  I could feel her stir at last—it took a long time—and finally she made a pass at my wrists, and then she put both her hands on my wrists and held tight. I felt relief, as if I wanted to be stopped. She held my wrists and I sobbed against her breasts. We were both lying on the floor, on our sides now, sobbing. At last I felt Pearl, who was stronger and bigger than I, release my wrists and put her arms around me, drawing me closer to her. My stockings were torn and I had heard something else rip. I think my heel had got caught in the hem of my skirt.

  At last I sat up. Neither of us spoke for a long time. We were both out of breath. “Go and wash,” Pearl said at last.

  I took off my coat and my gloves. The fingers of my gloves were split. I went into the bathroom and washed my face and hands and combed my hair. When I came out, Pearl was sitting in the living room nursing Simon, her blouse unbuttoned, a diaper thrown over her shoulder for modesty. Her hair was disheveled and there was a red mark on her cheek.

  I sat down, ashamed.

  “The hem of your skirt is hanging,” she said. “You’d better fix it. My sewing box is in the bedroom.”

  I went for a needle and thread. Then I took off my skirt and sat down opposite her and hemmed it. Most of the hem was down.

  “I haven’t told Mike I was the one who really did it,” said Pearl. “You told me not to talk about it.”

  “I haven’t told Nathan,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you say right away?” she said. “I thought everybody knew it was me, until later.”

  “I was confused,” I said. “Then I wanted them to think I did it.”

  “I shouldn’t have left her outside,” she said. “Everyone knows you can’t do that.”

  “I know,” I said, “but I might have done it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t know what I would have done.”

  She moved Simon to her other breast, but didn’t drape the diaper over her shoulder this time. “Nathan already hated me before,” she said, stroking Simon’s dark head. He was an industrious eater and he made a noise when he nursed. I hadn’t watched Pearl nurse him much. At our house she’d taken him into the bedroom.

  “No, he doesn’t hate you,” I said. “He certainly doesn’t hate you.” But I thought that maybe he did. He’d hated himself since he’d gone to bed with Pearl, I knew that, and maybe he hated her, too.

  Nathan had never asked me for a detailed explanation about Racket. He didn’t want to talk about what happened, or to talk about her. Pearl had gathered most of Racket’s clothes and removed them from the house, and Nathan had arranged with the super to store her crib in the basement. I’d put her shoes and a few other things away in a drawer. Already it was almost as if she had never been.

  It took me a long time to hem the skirt. We didn’t say anything more. Pearl finished nursing Simon and he fell asleep. She sat and held him on her lap for a while, and then she stood up gracefully and carried him into the other room. I made myself watch her, not letting myself think all the obvious thoughts—how it could have been me carrying a baby into the other room, and so on. In fact it hardly ever was me, not that way. Getting Racket to sleep was always a battle. I never glided along with her the way Pearl did with Simon. I don’t glide, anyway.

  Pearl had kept her hair short after she’d cut off her braid, and she looked young. Her neck looked long. I didn’t know whether Pearl would think I was crazy or be mad at me forever for hitting her, or whether she’d just be so embarrassed that it had happened—our lying on the floor crying and me hitting her, wearing my gloves and shoes—that it would be impossible even to talk. I felt meek, let me tell you, sitting there hemming that skirt under orders.

  I heard Pearl go into the bathroom. She was in there a long time, and I realized she was taking off her makeup and putting it on again so she could cover the red marks. When she came out she was wearing a fresh blouse and her hair was combed and her face looked nice. She sat down next to me. “I’d give anything to bring Rachel back,” she said. “I hope you know that.”

  “You wouldn’t give Simon,” I said cruelly. I was angry because she’d said Rachel. She hadn’t called Racket Rachel for months.

  “No,” she said, and stood up and went into the kitchen. Finally I finished hemming the skirt and I put it on. I followed Pearl into the kitchen. I think I wanted to see whether she would point out how unnecessary that last remark had been. I remembered the way it had felt when she held my wrists to keep me from hitting her any longer, and I think I wanted to see whether she’d do something like that again. But she didn’t say anything. She was washing her lunch dishes. I went and put on my coat and took my ruined gloves and my purse and let myself out of the apartment.

  After that when I felt like going out I didn’t go to Pearl’s house. I walked. Sometimes I’d meet a neighbor, and she’d bend her head and speak to me inaudibly. “I beg your pardon?” I’d say, but nobody ever said anything to me that I could hear.

  I had very little to do. I read many library books. Sometimes I read a whole book in a day, and later it would be hard to remember that I didn’t live in those characters’ lives. I never forgot about Racket, though, even while I was reading. Her death was always there.

  That winter, the Loyalists were doing badly in Spain, and the American volunteers were retreating with the rest of them. Nathan went to meeting after meeting, and came home shaking his head, saying little. It seemed to be the only thing that could distract him, hearing about the troubles in Spain, hearing people give speeches about Marxism, about economic justice, about the Soviet Union. He read a lot, too—difficult books about economic theory. I wondered how he could pay attention, but I think the books helped him, the way a different man might have been helped by climbing a steep mountain or swimming miles.

  Once or twice I went to a meeting with him. I was not tempted to go more often, though the meetings were more interesting than I expected. Nathan said less than he had before about his political opinions. He said less than he had before about everything. We hardly ever spoke. When I think of that winter, I remember silence and grayness. One day Nathan told me he’d heard that Ruby’s boyfriend, Billy, had been wounded at Teruel. He didn’t know how badly, or where Billy was. He knew a friend of Billy’s, and had run into him handing out leaflets.

  The next day I called Pearl. She’d seen Ruby. “Ruby wants to visit you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “She feels bad about Racket.”

  “She has better things to do.”

  “Hilda, why do you talk like that?” said Pearl.

  “I don’t talk like that.”

&nb
sp; Pearl went back to talking about Ruby and Billy. Billy had been wounded in the hip. His hip had been shattered, but he was alive. Ruby was happy that he was alive, but worried about him. He was still in Spain. She didn’t know much.

  “Tell Ruby she can come see me,” I said.

  Ruby came a week later. “That sweet baby,” she said as soon as she walked in. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard about that sweet baby.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I made coffee for her. I got her to talk about Billy. Billy had had to walk across the Pyrenees. He liked the Spanish people. He’d stamped on grapes with Spanish peasants in the Guadarrama mountains.

  “His letters aren’t really unhappy,” she said, “but he keeps writing about men who died. I’m supposed to visit their mothers. He sends me their names. Not the names of the mothers, thank goodness. He wants me to look in the phone book and see if I can figure out who the relatives are and go visit them. Can you imagine?”

  I shook my head.

  “It would be so hard,” said Ruby. “I don’t know if they’d want me to come. I didn’t know if you wanted me to, and we’d met before.”

  “It was nice of you to come,” I said. It might have been the first friendly thing I’d said to anybody since Racket died. She had died on November 19, 1937, and this was probably late February or early March. That’s a long time to go without saying anything nice. It made me like Ruby, because I’d said something pleasant to her, that little lie. Of course I hadn’t wanted her to come, any more than the grieving mothers of the boys lost in Spain would. I tried to figure out whether their pain would be worse than mine, whether it made it better or worse that your child had lived for years and you’d gotten to know him, whether it made it better or worse that he’d died for a good cause instead of in a stupid accident. I imagined Ruby going from house to house, making the grieving mothers lie about wanting her to come, and making them feel better because they’d been nice to somebody, dopey little Ruby who still looked about fourteen—well, maybe by now she looked sixteen—and the thought of it seemed funny.

  Then I realized that nothing whatever had seemed funny since the day Racket had died. I kept talking to Ruby—”Are you able to write to Billy?” I asked, and she said she kept writing but she didn’t know if he always got the letters. She had her hat on her lap and she kept turning it around and around, a little wool hat. But I was thinking different thoughts: I was trying to remember something funny from the months that had passed since November, something funny in the papers or on the radio. We still listened to the radio now and then, and I remembered that we used to laugh at many of the programs, but now I couldn’t recall anything funny at all. I suppose we’d stopped listening to the funny programs without even talking about it.

  It really wasn’t a funny year. Even in the worst parts of the Depression, funny things happened, silly things, just because everyone was so poor. I remember my father offering me his old socks, thinking there must be some use to them when they couldn’t be darned any longer, hating to throw them away, and how I’d laughed to think of a time in which a gift from a father to a daughter was used socks. I’d taken them, too. I used them for dust rags or something.

  But 1938 wasn’t a funny year. Maybe people who didn’t lose a baby found something to laugh at, but Nathan and I didn’t. I wondered whether he laughed at school. Being with young people—now there had to be funny moments there. Now I was really grateful to Ruby for coming. She had made me think. I gave her more coffee and then she left.

  That night I asked Nathan whether anything funny ever happened in his school. He looked out from under his eyebrows at me. He stared as if he had trouble seeing me, and I wondered whether he’d wept away his eyesight. Later it did turn out that he needed glasses. But then it seemed as if he was looking at me through fog and smoke. “Yes,” he said. “There’s a little girl. Evelyn Grossman. She’s very funny. She’s a natural comedienne.”

  “Do you laugh?”

  “I laugh.” He was reading the paper, and he looked down at it again. Then he looked up. “You think I shouldn’t laugh?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m glad there’s something to laugh at. Tell me something she said.”

  But he couldn’t remember. “Maybe you need to get out of the house,” he said.

  I thought that was true, and I began to think about getting a job. I’d thought about it right away, right after Racket died, when I realized how little there was for me to do at home. But I’d buy the paper and forget to read the want ads, or I’d sit down to read them without a pencil, and be so tired—from nothing—that I couldn’t stand up and go for a pencil to circle the promising ones. Then when I finally had some numbers to call, so much time had passed that I was sure those jobs had been filled.

  Now I began to think about a job. They were easier to find than when I got the job at Bobbie’s. I didn’t want to go back there. Everyone would talk about Racket. I wanted to take a job with strangers, and not tell them I ever had a baby. The only way I could get better was to let events cover her up. I began to know that I wouldn’t always feel as bad as I felt then. For a while I’d thought I’d feel the same way for my whole life. But when I thought about the mothers who had lost sons in Spain, I thought that maybe in ten years those women would feel a little better—and then it occurred to me that maybe I’d feel better in ten years, too.

  I decided I wanted to work in a store. It would be simple. Somebody wants shoes, you give her shoes, she gives you money, you put it in the till. I could be nice to people without too much trouble. I thought about all this for a few days, and then I dressed up a little and took the subway into New York and went to the big department stores—Lord & Taylor’s, Altman’s, Saks. I got a job at Macy’s, which pleased me because it was the biggest even though it wasn’t the fanciest. I wanted to be on the first floor where the crowds swirled around, but after I’d filled out an application and taken an arithmetic test and been trained for two days, they put me in Misses’ Sportswear. I liked the training. Someone had figured out everything and all I had to do was learn it. There was a procedure when a package was to be sent, a procedure for everything. I had to put the number of the department in a box, the date in another box. Each time I learned a new procedure, it made me feel better.

  When I got out on the floor, it was harder than I expected. I had to stand all day, and the first day there, I wore holes in my shoes. I went home and soaked my feet. They were red and blistered. Nathan was shocked.

  I made mistakes at work, and then tears would come to my eyes, as if I’d simply reached my limit in hard things before I got to that store. Making a mistake and having to get permission to void a sale and start over, I cried, but I didn’t let the woman in charge see me. Sometimes I just had to count things—skirts on a rack, or blouses folded on a shelf. I liked that. I couldn’t possibly do harm to anyone, counting skirts. After all, Pearl had left Racket outside that store, but I’d let Pearl push Racket’s stroller.

  I liked being able to help people. One customer didn’t speak English. I don’t know what language she was speaking, maybe Italian or Spanish. I kept smiling at her, and she smiled back and patted my arm. Finally I patted her arm. We got to be great friends. She went into the fitting room and I brought her skirts until she found one she liked. She could let me know what she liked and didn’t like, and I smiled and even clapped my hands. We rejoiced together. She had a wedding ring on. I wondered whether she also had had a baby who died. It could be true. She was in her thirties, and there were no children with her. Not speaking each other’s language, we didn’t have to talk about these dead children. We were able to rub cloth between our fingers and pantomime how much we liked the cut of the skirts.

  It was good to be bringing money home again. I’d thought money didn’t matter, even though Nathan didn’t make much, but with money we had possibilities. I used my employee discount to buy a new chair for the living room. It was the color of mustard, with a fringe on the bottom. When the chair
was delivered, I looked at it, and thought that it had nothing to do with Racket, it was a place where she had never been. It made me know we had to move, and after a few months, I began looking for another apartment. I walked up and down the streets on Sundays, looking for signs in windows advertising apartments for rent. At last I found one, just a few blocks away from our old apartment, but far enough to have different neighbors who didn’t know us. It was similar to our old apartment, a little bigger—but it felt different. You turned to the right when you walked in the front door, instead of to the left. Moving out, I felt as if I was leaving behind my daughter, who was buried under the floorboards. I felt worse than I had expected to feel. She had been dead for almost a year by then.

  It was after Nathan’s disillusionment with the Communists. I had found him slumped over, one day, listening to the radio. Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Nathan continued to go to meetings for a while after that, and some of his friends tried to reassure him. They said that Stalin knew what he was doing, that he should trust Stalin—but he couldn’t. Once I found him crying. After a while he stopped going to meetings. Then we moved, and we were busy in the apartment. We had to buy new things. I shortened our old living room curtains and put them in the bedroom, and bought new drapes for the living room.

  At work I was moved to the first floor and sold pocketbooks. I watched the crowd and marveled that I didn’t know any of these people. Sometimes elegant women in suits and dark hats walked by, talking to their friends, looking like characters from a play about the upper classes. Once a line of schoolgirls in uniform marched past me, speaking French. I had no idea who they were or how they’d got there. It was easier to sell purses than sportswear—I didn’t have to walk around so much. And it was one more move away from my old self, not just the self who still had a daughter, but even the newly bereaved self who cried when she made a mistake.