The Melting Pot

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Since today was Monday and Mrs. Axelrod watched the clock, she hurried the children down the subway steps, and using the map, she and Ronald figured out the route uptown.

  “You said breakfast, Mama,” Coralie reminded her when they got out.

  “Breakfast, Mama,” Denny repeated.

  “Breakfast! Good Lord, how could I forget? It’s all this moving around. And that place we stayed at.”

  “Mama, you know what that place was?” Ronald asked.

  “Don’t tell me, Ronald. I don’t want to know no more than I already do. We’ll go in here for Eggs McMuffin. Come on.”

  After she dropped Coralie at school, Ronald insisted on walking her back to Matilda’s, where she would leave Denny. It was clear she could never make it alone with the suitcases and stroller.

  “You’ll be late.”

  “No I won’t. I’ll run. I’m trying out for the track team.” He got her into the elevator and run he did, through the lobby to the front door in a streak, backpack slapping against his shoulders. A good boy, Louise thought as the door slid shut.

  “We moved,” Coralie told Matilda after school. “To a castle.”

  “What kind of castle! Don’t you start telling stories, girl.”

  “Ask my mother when she come back up. I’m not telling stories.”

  Louise entered with a basket of laundry and sat heavily down. “It’s no castle, Matilda. Just some peculiar place George found.”

  “George found a place? That’s real good. Why you so glum, then? How much rent you pay? Where’s it at?”

  “Downtown.”

  “Downtown where, Louise?”

  “Fifties, maybe?”

  “No address?”

  “It’s temporary. Just till we can find something better.”

  Wiry and shrewd, Matilda regarded her for a moment. “Comfortable, at least? Furnished, or what?”

  “Oh, very comfortable.” Louise curled deeper in the soft chair. It was the first night in two weeks she and George had had a room to themselves.

  “Why’d you bring these old suitcases, then?”

  “Lord, I am so tired. I waxed four floors this morning. How’s my baby doing, eh? Come here, sweet baby. Was he a good boy today, Matilda?”

  “Good boy today,” Denny echoed.

  “You want to be secretive, you go ’head. I’m going to fix dinner.”

  Louise turned her attention to Gilligan’s Island. A group of castaways had put together living quarters on their desert island. Simple but adequate. Uninterested in the plot, she studied the various domestic arrangements, but they proved of no help. Manhattan was not a desert island. The story was pure fantasy, fantasy characters living in a further fantasy, like Coralie’s plastic nesting boxes, melted in the fire.

  George was not so close-mouthed. “You hear we found a place?” he said to his aunt over dinner, lentils and sausages. “I knew I would. Big! You could put twenty more families in the extra space. Just wait till I get working on it, then we—”

  “Working on it!” Ronald almost choked. “Dad—”

  “Ronald!” His mother nudged his leg.

  “Well, I’ll be looking forward to an invitation. When you say so, of course.” Matilda sounded cool.

  “Mind if I leave two suitcases here?” Louise asked.

  She stared. “I won’t ask you no more questions. Put them in the closet where Delia won’t trip on them. She’ll be home from work pretty soon, so why don’t you go on down to your nice new home so’s I can clean up.”

  George insisted that they stay. There was no reasoning with him—he snapped and sulked if Louise or Ronald protested. Anyway, what could they suggest in its place? It was better than the Peter Minuit, she had to admit. Lonely, yes, after the lushness of home, the warm air sweet and weighty with human life, but loneliness was better than neighbors who terrified you. And George was doing his best. Near the elevator he had discovered a row of well-appointed offices, and in the largest was a bathroom with a tiled shower. By turning a few valves he made water flow in the kitchen sink; he even managed to turn on the gas so they could have coffee in the morning and Louise could fry bread and eggs for the children—with all the fancy shutters and carpeting, there was no toaster. Once he had adjusted some wires behind the refrigerator, she could keep food overnight for the lunches she packed as the sun came up; she even began fixing simple suppers, to avoid imposing on Matilda so often. Evenings, after the homework was done and Denny asleep, they sat in the living room gazing up at the TV suspended in air—George had gotten it to work with extension cords—and displaying the sprightly families in the featureless homes, never a picture crooked on the wall or a newspaper strewn on the floor. Watching, Louise would grow faint with unease. The families on TV lived in no real place, and yet if real people lived there, perhaps it became real. Or could the real people be turned instead into fantasies? The border between those realms, once clear and precise, was stretching open, perhaps to swallow her like a ravine. Luckily fatigue cut short such speculation. It was not simply her days at work. The hardest work was scurrying around after all the eating, sleeping, washing, and dressing, to destroy every trace of human passage.

  One night when they finished supper early they heard a familiar blithe tune, buoyant voices singing about moving on up to the East Side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky. The screen showed a black family this time, the father a runty-looking fellow with a mustache, the mother very handsome in an ample, genial way, and a fine-looking son. The kind of young man George would be happy to see Ronald become—he had thought that even years ago, when he first saw this family and Ronald was a mere baby. It might well happen, too—Ronald had grown to be a clever, responsible boy. ... They were arguing, the father showing himself, as always, to be a loud and silly man. As he strode angrily about, the living room came into view. George’s throat stuck and he could not swallow. He disguised a gasp with a cough. A heavy silence shaped itself around him.

  It was almost a relief when Coralie shouted, “Daddy, look!” A shriek for the impossible, the sound rimmed with wonder and protest.

  George leaped from the couch and bounded off the un-walled threshold of the apartment, past the lights and gargantuan cameras. As he tore the cord from the wall the faces were sucked into a tiny white light that died like a vanquished star. “Daddy, Daddy!” she cried again. “Did you see?” He took a deep breath. The irascible mustached man on the screen had looked so foolish in his rage. He swept Coralie up in his arms and whirled her about. “Hey, big girl with the big voice! Look how heavy you are now! Are you too big to play pony like we used to?”

  Overjoyed, she swung her legs over his shoulders as Louise and Ronald watched, stiff and silent. Look-alikes, George often thought them. Dark full faces, keen orange-tinged eyes. This very moment those keen glances were shaming him, and unjustly. Wasn’t he doing all a man could possibly do under the circumstances?

  In bed that night Louise felt the misery in his curved back and put her arms around him. “George, honey, we’ve been lucky so far. But you know it can’t last. Anyway, it’s just not right. No neighbors, nothing. Like off in outer space, you know?”

  There was only the sound of his breathing. “And it’s getting cold, and no heat at night.” Anger shot to his skin, to be appeased by her hands. “I’ll get us some space heaters.” He turned to face her.

  “George,” she sighed. “Do you even hear me?”

  “I’ll be your space heater, eh? How’s that?”

  He kissed her and she sighed again, then put it all aside and gave in. There were few enough pleasures.

  She did not tell him that the night before, while he and Ronald were out getting Chinese food, an old black woman in sneakers, dragging a mop and pail, had appeared outside. Outside the apartment, that is, in the spacious darkness Louise pretended was a forest surrounding them, the cameras bizarre trees and bushes.

  “Hold it,” the woman had said, spotting Louise. “I must of got out at the wron
g floor. What’s this here?”

  “Four.”

  “Shit. I done pressed the wrong button. I’m supposed to do three on Monday and Wednesday. Who can keep track, I ask you. I thought the one for up here came in the mornings. What you doing here now?”

  “They asked me.” Louise shrugged. “I guess there’s something special going on in the morning.”

  The woman had already started dragging her mop towards the elevator. She looked back over her shoulder. “You bring your kids with you? Jeez, what you young girls won’t think of.”

  Louise breathed again when the woman disappeared. From then on she spent every spare moment searching for a place to live, sometimes alone, sometimes with Coralie and Denny. She didn’t like leaving them with Matilda all the time, hearing her pained questions and telling pained lies. When Denny got chilly or cranky they resorted to what shelter was at hand. She tested the beds in the furniture department of Macy’s, sat at the dining room tables and imagined her family seated around her, each one before an impeccable, tasteful place setting, with Denny in a high chair. They might just as easily have ended up here. But Denny got restless in department stores. His favorite place was the Museum of Natural History (“Pay what you wish but you must pay something”): behind glass loomed dioramas of exotic dwellings, igloos, Indian villages, even the lairs of wild animals. It was cozy and soothing in the dusky rooms encircled by glaring beasts, so real and menacing, yet utterly harmless. And downstairs was a fully equipped cafeteria where they stopped for snacks. It might be spooky at night, though, sleeping in the shadow of dinosaur bones. ... Coralie wanted to live next door in the Planetarium, under the stars, but Louise explained that the stars in the Planetarium came out only at show times. “Aren’t they the real stars?” she wanted to know. “They’re the real stars, but in a sort of picture. You can’t see them unless they turn on the machine.” Coralie was not satisfied with this explanation. Louise was puzzled herself.

  Over on Fifth Avenue stood a stately mansion through whose doors passed beautifully dressed people surrounded by an aura—what was it? Ownership, she decided. If only she could enter, she too might move in that aura, where nothing could be denied her. She would care for it well, leaving not a trace in the morning—she knew how. But the man at the entrance said children under ten were not permitted. That would never do.

  In the big museum farther up the avenue everyone was permitted (again, “Pay what you wish but you must pay something”). Whole classes of children, shepherded by their teachers, stampeded up its imposing front stairs. Indeed, the crowd packing its lobby was huger than the crowd at the airport six weeks ago that seemed like six years, and more avid than the shoppers who streamed off the ships each afternoon to fill the streets of Charlotte Amalie. The room Louise loved best, perhaps because it reminded her a little of home, looked like a greenhouse, huge and light, sun streaming in the slanted glass walls. They could eat here in its waning rays, and the children could play beneath the immense potted plants. They would sleep on the long leather benches in the adjacent rooms or even, she thought in a moment of despair, across the lobby on the old stone tombs of kings and queens.

  She finished early on a Thursday, Mr. Vickers’s day, and after an hour of apartment hunting in a shabby district, wandered into the YMHA—there was no hurry; Coralie was visiting a friend from school. The guards on each floor were friendly, and one showed her the heated swimming pool. The children would love that; they hadn’t had a chance to go swimming since they got here. There were showers galore, and a lounge with soft couches, and surely somewhere a kitchen. She studied the catalogue; you could learn to do just about anything, it seemed. She could take up the guitar, or photography, or ballet—she used to be a good dancer before Ronald was born, when she and George had gone dancing every Saturday night. Coralie could learn arts and crafts, and Ronald and George could shoot baskets in the gym. There was even day care. Actually, the catalogue explained, the day care was for the babies of teen-aged girls who needed to finish high school, hardly her case, yet they might make an exception. ...

  But always there came the hour to return from these excursions to real life, either to meet the children at Matilda’s or to go home. She was coming to think of it as home; day by day it housed a life with emerging outlines, and the pattern frightened her. She might be sitting in front of Matilda’s friend’s TV one afternoon and see herself. Ronald would rush in with a few of his ballplaying friends, sweaty, robust, energetic boys, worried over some little problem involving a lost bat or a failed exam, which she would set about solving only to complicate matters, but in the end all would be well, only a web of misunderstandings, nothing real.

  She dragged herself reluctantly from the Y, and when she arrived at Matilda’s, fell into a chair and shut her eyes.

  “You that tired, child?”

  “I sure am.”

  “When you go home tonight you get yourself a good rest. Don’t do no more fixing up or whatever you do, just get yourself to sleep.”

  “I want to go home now!” Coralie clamored.

  “We can’t, honey. Not yet.” It was only five-fifteen. George had said six was safe, but Louise didn’t feel safe till six-thirty or seven, and even then, never quite safe.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, stop whining. Did you have a nice time with your friend? What’s her name again?”

  “Cindy. She wants to come to my house. Can she come to my house tomorrow?”

  “No, not tomorrow.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” Denny echoed. Louise took him on her lap. He was too docile for a three-year-old. And she didn’t recall the other two constantly echoing things. This life was taking its toll even on him. “Because I said so, that’s why. Because we live too far downtown. Too long a trip for her mama to pick her up.”

  “She could sleep over. She could get in my sleeping bag.”

  “Coralie, we’ll talk about it later—”

  “What’s this sleeping bag business? Ain’t you all got beds yet?”

  “Ronald and me, we sleep on the floor—”

  “The beds are coming this weekend,” she told Matilda.

  “Huh! Well, stop your bickering. My program’s coming on—they done give it a new time.”

  Coralie pouted and slunk away to the kitchen, and Louise bounced Denny absently as the theme song began. The family that was moving on up. There was the heavy, handsome woman with the deep voice, talking to another black woman. Louise couldn’t remember seeing her before—it had been so long ... From the way the lady of the house was giving instructions, friendly and specific, like Mrs. Butler, the other must be her maid. She answered back sassily, though, very familiar for a maid. Suddenly Denny catapulted from her lap to the screen, his index finger jabbing.

  “Our living room! Our couch!” he cried. “The lady be sitting on our couch!”

  “Stop poking that screen, Denny,” said Matilda. “What’s he saying?”

  “Look, the mirror! Look, now our kitchen! There’s things on the table.”

  “Denny!” Louise grabbed him. “Stop it!” Just when she was thinking maybe he was a little slow. “It’s nothing. We have a couch something like that, that’s all.”

  Denny struggled to get free. “Our house! Why are they in our house?”

  “Louise, honey.” Matilda turned to her. “What kind of place you living in? You got an East Side apartment like that?”

  “Of course we don’t.”

  Matilda sat up very straight. “That’s why you never ask me over. You don’t want no one there seeing who your family is.”

  “Matilda, you’re talking crazy! How could we pay for a place like that? And you know I’d ask you if I could. It’s just not fixed up yet.”

  “I want to go on TV too,” Denny was hollering. “Mama, can I go on TV next time? Please?”

  Coralie ran in from the kitchen, shouting, “Who’s going on TV? Who?”

  “I better go. George’ll be home soon.
Coralie, get your jacket. Ronald can come on down by himself. I’ll leave a subway token.”

  “Yes, maybe it’s time you went.”

  “Matilda, please. You just don’t know. ... Sometimes I fear I’m coming unstitched.”

  George arrived home slightly later than usual that night—he too had stopped to see a few cheap apartments advertised in the paper. But there was no point in looking, the supers had said: already taken. He was shoving despair to one side like a rampant undergrowth as he stepped out of the elevator, to find the place blazing with light. George had grown used to imagining, at this point each evening, that he was walking home through the amiable streets of his neighborhood, and he peopled them with faces from home. There, people in town had known him and greeted him, returning from work. Here it was like living on a desert island, or being the last family on a dark earth after they dropped the bomb. No dark earth tonight, though, but eerily bright, like coming home sick in the middle of the day.

  He found Louise in the kitchen. “Why all the lights?” He kissed the children, picked Denny up and tossed him about.

  “It was like this when we got here. Something’s funny, George. I don’t know. ... The things outside are different too.”

  He saw from the kitchen window that the cameras had been rearranged. And out the sliding glass doors, behind the terrace, stood two enormous pieces of Masonite painted to show a city skyline by night. “Nah, it’s nothing. I’ll go turn them out. What’s for dinner?”