Chains Around the Grass (17 page)

“Alle fini,” Louis called from the bathroom, and she thought: Dave is right. He’s old enough to wipe himself. Then she stopped, appalled to have thought of her dead husband—sacred now—in connection with such a thing.

Nothing exists apart from him, she suddenly realized. He’s a part of everything I have, everything I think, everything I remember. And even in the lifetime of things yet to come, I’ll know what he would have thought, or said or felt.

“Alle fini!” Louis called again, his voice more insistent, bordering on tears.

“Mommy’s coming! Mommy’s almost there!” she called back, terrified he would cry. No one, she thought, must cry.

When Jesse returned, they gathered around him in the kitchen watching as he unpacked Devil Dogs, a bottle of Royal Cola, a bag of potato chips, and a Wonder bread.

Ruth looked over the items, speechless. “On this you spend my money?! This you call food shopping?”

“I like it,” he answered sullenly.

She sat down as her legs grew weak. A giggle rose to her throat, then a laugh that exploded from her chest, shaking her body and sending tears rolling down her cheeks. The children looked on uncertainly.

“My savior,” she murmured, unwrapping a cream cake and licking the gooey vanilla cream from its center. The children smiled, feasting on potato chips, chocolate cake and warm soda that burst from the bottle like a geyser, splattering the kitchen wall.

Later on, the neighbors came by with a straw basket filled with food. Ruth touched each one and felt the returning warmth of their cheeks and hands buoying her up.

“And if you need anything… If we can help you with the kids…anything,” Mrs. Cohen nodded encouragement.

“Please, Ruth, feel free to ask,” Dundee Williams implored, her pale baby in her arms, his delicate skin blue-veined, almost transparent.

“For goodness sake, don’t be bashful a moment about it,” one of the elderly Scottish sisters insisted kindly.

“How…?” Mrs. Cramer began delicately, “did it happen?” Ruth saw them shuffle their feet in embarrassment and wanted

to answer quickly to spare them. But the more she tried to think of a way to express clearly and sensibly what had taken place, the more she realized that she really didn’t know.

Had he fallen ill or had he made himself sick? Had the operation been a “safe” one, as the doctors had promised and his death a result of blatant incompetence? Or had something unavoidable gone wrong, even as the best doctors tried to save him? Or had God simply turned His back on them, with or without a reason?

“I don’t know,” she finally whispered, as if to herself and saw their faces fill with pity and surprise.

“Can we do anything, anything at all?” Dundee Williams pleaded.

Ruth began the polite reflex of shrugging off their help, but something stopped her. “If you could lend me some potatoes, until tomorrow,” she asked humbly, “I could make a little supper.”

“Oh, come to me! I’ll make you a good supper!” Mrs. Cramer insisted.

“No, thank you very much. Kids are tired, you know. But if I could just have a few potatoes…” she heard her voice take on a new tone—humble, yet wheedling and impressive.

“Of course, of course!! Don’t even mention it!” they said in a chorus, appalled she might have misinterpreted their stunned pity for reluctance.

“Honey,” Mrs. Robinson put a kind arm around Ruth’s shoulders, saving her from any confusion, “you just lost your man, the good Lord help us. Can’t nobody do nothing ’bout that. But what I mean to tell you, what we all mean to say, is that you’re not alone. Understand, honey?”

Ruth nodded, unable to speak, a sharp stab of love taking her breath away.

The potatoes were new and white beneath the dirty peels, she noted with pleasure as she grated them. She felt an inexplicable sadness as she watched the solid knob dissolve into a formless mass. Perhaps if I had been stronger, she mourned, watching the nicks on her fingers tinge the formless mass pink, perhaps I could have saved him. Pressed up against life’s merciless sharpness, she wondered now what it was that would keep her from dissolving. What was the answer? Someone, she told herself, will have to step in. Even now, out there, somewhere, they must be planning her rescue.

A poor widow with three small children.

She turned the phrase over in her mind, mesmerized by its power, appalled and attracted, almost enthralled by its solid edges, its weighted presence.

A poor widow with three small children!

You couldn’t ignore that. No sirree. She looked at the crumpled yellow cellophane paper and the straw from the neighbor’s almost empty basket. Bless them! They’d be there for the cups of sugar, the odd cup of milk. Morris would do what his conscience and his religion dictated. He would struggle to be generous and invariably fail. He had growing daughters of his own who would need orthodontia, expensive vitamins, college educations, dowries, weddings… About Dave’s family, who had money, Reuben and his sister, she had no illusions. They would disappear the same way they had suddenly surfaced. Even as they’d walked away from the grave wiping their tears they’d already begun to shy away from her, to give excuses, she thought bitterly. The poor relation, she thought, already feeling superior to them, happy to be rid of them.

She will never admit the truth to herself that she too was at fault. That she never played the game. Never invited them over. Never accepted their invitations. That she was shy in the rudest possible way, and now, needing them desperately, she knew that she’d burnt her bridges. It was so much easier that way: A poor widow, with three small children! And they, the husband’s family, who don’t call, don’t visit… To finally be so clearly in the right after all the years of being in the wrong. But no one will accuse her now. Whatever her crimes, she has finally earned absolution.

A Poor Widow. With Three Small Children.

Widow’s and Survivor’s benefits. From Social Security. How much? Enough for rent, food, clothing? How much? she wonders, adding her last two eggs to the batter, and pouring the oil into a frying pan. Waiting for it to sizzle, she turns around and glances at the ragged sofa, the public housing white paint on the dirty walls, the windows dusty with incinerator smoke. How did they say it on TV? “Ruth Markowitz, this is your life!”

Her skirt was tugged. There was noise in the bedroom. Sara and Jesse, fighting. Again.

“Ungry, Mommy. Ungry,” Louis tugged, a little desperate, his face flushed from sleep, his eyes worried.

She looked down. He thinks I can help him, she suddenly realized with wonder. He thinks I’m in charge. The provider. The final address for all needs, all complaints, all lack. Me, Ruth Markowitz, the youngest child, the dependent, who always had someone to care for her. Her stomach rumbled with panic as the child’s wails rose.

She lifted him, wiping his tears. “Hungry? Poor little tateleh, poor little sweetheart. Mommy makes you something yummy, in a minute, OK?”

This, she realized, was the answer: to think about the next minute, the next half hour. She could almost smell the potato pancakes frying, see them heaped with sugar on the plate. The kids would love them. They’d be satisfied and go to bed full. And then tomorrow for breakfast, there was still the jar of jelly from the straw basket, and the white bread Jesse had bought. As for lunch, that was far away. Eons away. There was no point in thinking about it now.

Chapter sixteen

Something permanent happens when you are a small child whose father or mother dies. Your life is not crushed—for there is tremendous resilience and irrepressible joy in a child—as much as it is transformed. You are thrust from the splendid simplicity of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into the complexity of mourning. Most of all, you are forced into contact with the world of the spirit, with the idea that body and soul can be disconnected. And once you know that, even cornflakes in a bowl can never be the same again.

And then too, you learn that adult lesson of aching and longing and being denied; of begging some unknown power to please, please make it all a mistake. And you grow up with that unrequited longing, that unanswered prayer, and your view of life can never go back to what it was when you held your good father’s or mother’s hand and watched the Merry-Go-Round dance its way singing past the brass ring…

But Sara was to be extremely lucky. Although nothing in those dark days could have ever foretold it, something else would come along, so unexpected, so warmly beautiful, that she would once again begin to blossom and grow. But this was some time later and not as magical, or even unusual, as people might suppose.

All that summer and fall, Sara sat by the window. Oh, to be sure there were breaks for doll-playing, for television watching, for food-scavenging (meals, balanced on a plate, protein-vegetable-carbohydrate were beyond her mother’s skills or imagination. “Do you want a little corn?” Ruth would ask her). But the distilled essence of her days, that which she would remember as her childhood, was looking out of the window, imprisoned. Until of course, she was finally rescued.

Picture her there, her elbows on the sill, her face intent and serious, her imagination fed by producers of Hollywood depression movies and cheap game shows. She watches the Black teenage boys grouped around the projects’ wooden benches, studying their legs flung wide, their elbows draped possessively across the armrests. She strains to hear their songs, melodies with no beginning and no end. She does not understand that they too are dreamers, dreaming themselves out of Rockaway and poverty, into Motown, slick suits and national fame. Unaware, their gathering threatens her, for they seem to lie in wait, impassable sentinels, blocking her path. It is they who own the streets, the playgrounds, the elevators, the stairways.

But from the seventh floor even the biggest Black boys with the nylon stockings wound around their heads (for ringworm, her mother says) looked like dolls. You could watch them running after each other and hitting each other (she never actually saw them do this, but imagined it nevertheless within their power), and they couldn’t see or touch you. She loved to rest her hand over the radiator and feel the hot steam rising, warming her face like a caress. If I was outside, would they beat me? she often mused, drowsy, warm and safe. Would their big hands hit my face, my chest and legs? It was delicious to let your mind wander out there and then snatch it back, safe and warm behind the window. The lovely, lovely window.

“Why don’t you go outside and play? Look how pale you are!” her mother’s litany would begin each day, at least once a day. She had learned to ignore it, reading the answer in the fearful pinched crevice between her mother’s eyebrows, which contradicted the words, begging her not to go.

But it was not the Black teenagers she was looking for as she sat there, lulled by the warmth of the rising steam, the soft light that filtered through the incinerator smoke, curling its way around the dark red bricks. They were simply part of the landscape. She thought of herself as a lighthouse keeper, a watchman on guard, a sailor on the topmost rigging, scouting for land. It was her duty to be there when the magic moment happened, as it surely must, for no other explanation made any sense.

She scouted the men passing by, searching for those of a certain height, a certain weight, a certain walk. So many men passed each day. She followed each with hope until he turned right instead of left or left instead of right, or drew close enough to prove too tall or too short, too thin or too heavy. And each disappointment chipped away at her hope, reducing it, but never actually killing it. Like a plant cut to the ground, the roots sent up foolish new growth that twined around the facts, embellishing them, giving them something akin to beauty.

Hadn’t they told the Little Princess that her father was dead? Hadn’t they taken away all her beautiful clothes and toys and given her only scraps of food to eat? Hadn’t Shirley stamped her stubborn little foot and shaken her pretty curls refusing to believe, sneaking away from that awful school and waiting by the train station where soldiers were coming back from the war? And hadn’t she found her father lying on a stretcher with a bloody bandage around his head? And then, hadn’t Shirley smiled and said: “It wasn’t true. Oh, I knew it wasn’t true!!” And everyone told her she was a brave little girl, a good little girl for not believing, for waiting…

So Sara sat there, looking beyond the red, eyeless brick buildings, out to the small houses by the sea; houses—her father had once explained—which used to be filled with the summering rich who’d built them. Houses with chimneys, porches and rocking chairs; places that seemed to have faces that welcomed you home, not like her own. She would have loved to live there instead. But the people who did—the old Black men with hair like steel wool, the heavy Black women, the hordes of shiny-faced little boys—made it impossible. These were their streets. Here too, she believed she had no permission to pass by unmolested.

From the seventh story of her prison tower, she surveyed her enchanted kingdom like one of those spellbound princesses in the fairy stories she adored. One day, a fairy godmother would find her, giving her golden wings to soar above it, a magic wand to drip fairy dust down upon it, transforming it all into something manageable and benign. This is her plan. Until then, she allows nothing to distract her from her post, her vigil, and her watch. Nothing but food and television—the fuzzy gray-white picture, the indoor antenna one needed to cajole and massage into producing clearer visions. It was a way out of the projects. A place you could fly to safely without moving your body through dangerous obstacles.

Her favorite show was Queen for a Day.

“Now don’t be shy. You just tell our studio audience your story.” A heavy, middle-aged woman ran her hand nervously through mildly disheveled hair. Sara noticed the hair especially because it looked like her mother’s. It was the only show on TV where women had hair like that and were too fat. The woman looked at her sadly. The man who asked the questions was a regular TV person with nice clothes, neat shiny hair, and a little smile. He asked the woman how many children she had and when she told him six, he staggered back as if flabbergasted and repeated it, shaking his head, and then began to clap and the people you couldn’t see clapped with him. Sara shifted impatiently, waiting for the main thing, the part that would decide