“Why not?” Mother tosses her hair back with a queenly nod. “You won’t get another chance. Of course these times you never know. Some people get married every other year to a new person.”
A smothered groan escapes Dad: he sees this going on, every two years a new suitor he must play the father for.
Howie and I avoid each other’s gaze. He has a sentimental preference for my father, who speaks American, has a regular job, watches the ball games. With my mother Howie turns political, searching for weaknesses on which to rest an alliance or push an advantage. He disapproves of her for not resembling his own pallid suffering refugee mother. I want him to admire her sass, to understand how a lack of scope for her energy and imagination has warped her, to gauge the richness living has withered but not without traces, like the fossils of vanished jungles in rock. I am the product of her imagination and her poverty of outlets. I watch them try to manipulate the other, wanting each to catch at least a glimpse of what compels my love.
We expected trouble from his family, but I am the compromise candidate. At first his mother is stiff with me, her eyes plowing my face. But once we have eaten together, she begins to thaw. I have the feeling of a breath held and held, now let out in a long sigh. As Howie explains later, his mother said, “We were afraid you’d marry the other one. The Greek.”
For hours measured by the drip, drip of an old cuckoo clock, stalactite of time leaking to stone, I sit on the flowered couch beside her. His grandmother twisted with arthritis crouches in the armchair before us. Across the room Howie has the TV on.
“After the chasseneh, you can get, eppes, a better job, a smart girl like you,” Grandmother urges.
“Then Howie won’t have to work long hours in the hospital every summer,” his mother chimes in. “He needs a vacation.”
“Going to medical school is enough work for him,” Grandmother says in her turn. “Let’s talk tachlis, you can’t get a full-time job?”
I look to him for help but he watches TV, shutting out our voices. At night his mother sleeps on this couch. She gave up her twin bed to Howie, while Grandmother sleeps in the other twin. “I write. That’s the real work I do. The jobs I take are to make a living so I can write.”
“Writing poetry, that’s fine in college. You did well in college, I remember.” His mother nods encouragingly at me. “You had a good scholarship. Poetry, playing music, it’s nice. Later you’ll have something to give your children.”
“But now you’re getting married, nu. You have your husband to think about. No children till he’s settled in a practice.” The grandmother waves her swollen forefinger at me.
“It’s your job to watch out for that,” his mother whispers.
“Oh, absolutely, I agree. No children for years.”
“I’m a grandmother three times, I’m in no hurry already,” his mother pleads. Her voice is gentle, caressive. Although she has no accent, it is the softness, the texture of her voice that are foreign. All her sentences rise on the ends. Even when she is trying to bully me into becoming a proper wife, her rising inflection makes the remarks sound like wondering questions. “Later on you’ll give me grandchildren.”
“Not too much of this later. I’ll hold on, halevai, but I’m not seventy anymore,” the grandmother says.
“He must be settled in a practice first,” his mother says. “He’ll start out in debt. You can’t give them more money. Your savings will be gone by the end of his schooling.”
Grandmother mutters something inaudibly, glaring. Her savings have meant power and she does not want ever to see the end of them.
Now his mother brings out a fat album. Hours of Grandmother’s children, aunts and their husbands, of grandchildren, of Howie’s father who was once a baby in Poland, a child in Germany, a teenager voyaging across the wild wide ocean. Hours of Howie’s brother Milt. I suspect his mother prefers her older son, for with him the ground is certain. He lives half a mile distant. She talks to him every day. I want to thrust the album from me. That child in faded sailor suit dragging a wagon, what can I do for him? Then suddenly Howie’s sixteen-year-old face glowers from its veil of fat. With a pang of queasy guilt I meet its squinted wary stare: was marriage what we meant? Are we wiser or more foolish?
My days are run like an airport, appointments just missing collision. Mother plays traffic control. Forced to choose between Yahweh and the God of the County Court, we go off for a nervous chat with a reform rabbi who married Dick Weisbuch five years ago. The families have negotiated over our heads that we are to marry in Detroit at Thanksgiving. The wedding is clearly not going to be quite as simple as we had imagined; on the other hand, it is not going to happen immediately. I suspected when Howie took control of my life that we were to be married in Detroit as soon as we told our respective families. Mother gives me to understand preparation takes months.
electric toaster
6 towel sets, assorted colors
7 linen dish towels
canister set
wall can opener
good knives
Father has removed to the basement, where the protesting whine of his saw accuses us as it bites wood to soothe him. That night Howie said we would marry, I did not dream of aluminum bread boxes.
“Donna never writes me any longer,” Mother complains. “Out of sight, out of mind. Thick as thieves when she’s in town and then kiss her good-bye.”
I cannot tell if Mother grew to like Donna or if she simply wants to be in on the story. With hindsight I know that Donna forced the intimacy to fill the gap of doing without me. Now that she has worked out a way to see me without Peter being aware, she has forgotten my mother. Donna is narrow in her passions, whether of love or friendship, but long-lasting.
“Howie may not be as showy a catch as Peter but he’s a good boy and Jewish. When you come down to it, Donna should marry her kind and you should marry yours. That way, you both know what you’re getting…. Is he affectionate, Jill?”
My skin crawls with memory. In my room, sultry summer. I stood squirming, trying to hide my love for Mike where she could not damage it, while she probed. For a moment I feel wary and defensive as one of my apartment’s roaches. I want to turn with my teeth bared and shout, Look I am playing this bloody stupid family game but don’t push me too hard. Blandly I say, “Yes, Mother. He has a pleasant disposition.”
“Um.” She sucks on it. “Well, he’s more of a mensh than that Mike Loesser you brought home.” As if the same memory had been triggered in her. What makes me feel betrayed are the little comments that reveal she too imagines that I will buckle down to the boring routine she calls being a woman and give up everything I want to do. “You can always write an evening now and then. Once the children are in school you’ll get a little time for hobbies again.”
My mother: the miracle is that in middle age we are friends. As I get older, she admits to being older and older. I still do not know how old Pearl is, but I know she took a big risk in having me. Actually the story of her early years makes more sense if you have an extra five years or so to play with. Why did she stop disapproving of me? She likes the row of books. A couple of years ago, she began to talk about dying. She said that she is sorry she could not love me when I was younger, but that she can love me now; except that she still can’t use that word with me. She still asks me if men are affectionate. She asks me that about Josh: “Is he affectionate, Jillie?”
I am finally not embarrassed. “Yes, Mother, he is. He’s the most affectionate man I’ve ever met.” I mean that; I also mean the other if affectionate has been all these years a code word for sexual passion. I am still not sure.
Mother, the romantic still and eternally, in her mid-eighties preferred Josh to all my other men because she found him more attractive herself than any other man of mine she had met. “Age, phooey,” said my mother grandly. “All the women in my family marry younger men. If he isn’t ten years younger, you aren’t properly matched. They wear out sooner, and who wants to
be left a widow? Don’t you have to train them no matter what?”
Now that I am in my forties, she tells me I’m beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.
Howie and I are silent on the plane and on the airport bus. We are stuffed, glutted, talked out. He goes up to his apartment near Columbia to get his gear together for registration. I head home. I’ll call in for a work assignment tomorrow morning, but I may have to wait till next Monday for a job.
As I go up the steps Conrad, the earring maker next door, sticks his head out. “You have to do something about that cat! It’s been crying all day and all night. I’m going to call the SPCA.”
“I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I’ve been out of town. A friend was supposed to feed her.”
“I can’t stand that howling.”
“She won’t do it ever again, I promise!”
Damn Donna! After she volunteered, too. Alberta’s Sag Harbor rental was up August 31 and she would have fed Minouska efficiently, even though she has a political objection to pets. As I unlock the door Minouska bursts into the hall. I have to chase her down four flights to the bottom while Conrad peers out through the crack of his door.
“Minouska!” I grab her. “I’ll feed you. Don’t be crazy!” She scratches my arm for the first time in two years. I carry her stiff and protesting in yowls back up the stairs. I dump her inside, grab my suitcase and slam the door. What’s that smell? Like spoiled meat.
When I step to the door of the living room I see her. She lies on her back tangled in my quilt, one arm raised on the pillow, one arm stiff off the bed’s side. The quilt, the mattress, the floor are soaked, puddled in dark congealed blood. Even at the first instant as my knees buckle and I clutch the doorjamb, I know. Even as I call, “Donna!” and run to her to kneel clutching her cold arm, looking into her eyes pale, open and jellied, I know. Her skin is blue. Her mouth is colorless. She is dead.
A cry leaks from my throat. I tug at her, wanting to find some warmth, some life, wanting to beat her, to pummel her back to breathing. The sheets are stuck to her with dried blood from her womb. Did she abort herself? But she had money. She must have found a doctor. Why didn’t she tell me? Why? I moan with rage.
I am sitting on the floor. I have been crying a long time, so long I feel drunk. Her death forces itself through me like raw grain alcohol, white lightning, leaving me dizzy. I gasp for breath. I know I cannot just sit here. I see by the clock that it is seven and I must do something. What do you do with a dead friend? I feel she is mine, yet I reject her death, I will not forgive it. Not this stupid, stupid dying into meat, not the people who killed her with their law-armored hatred of women.
I wash my hands and face. I feed my terrified cat. I walk back into the living room, feeling hollow. She died alone here hemorrhaging violently. Beside the bed is a cup with tea in it and a teapot. A wet towel. She must have tried ice cubes. The phone is off the hook and dead. I put it back. Now the tears run down my face steadily as a faucet left dripping.
I cannot go on sitting here with her. I feel crazy, empty. I must do something but cannot think what. Her hand rigid in midair beside the mattress is the left hand with a gold band. She belongs to Peter in death. I call her number. It feels strange to call in the evening. “Peter, this is Jill—”
“What do you want? Are you calling for her? Where in hell is she?”
“I just came back from Detroit. I found her here. In my apartment. Peter, she’s dead.”
“What?”
“She bled to death here.”
“What did she do, get an abortion? The two of you! I knew it. That bitch! That bitch!” He is sobbing with anger.
I actually understand. I am angry too, although for different reasons. “I don’t know. I just walked in from the airport.”
“That’s your story. What do the police say?”
“What police?”
“Haven’t you called the police?”
“No. I didn’t think of that.”
“Well, you’re in trouble. I’ll call them now. I reported her missing when she didn’t come home last night…. What’s your address?”
“I’ll call them.” I hang up. That was a consoling conversation. We were able to offer each other a lot of comfort. I phone the police and say what I have to say three times, spelling my name, spelling her name. It occurs to me that Peter guessed about the abortion right away, that he was not at all surprised she was pregnant. Whereas Donna thought he’d never guess. A small hole, like a pinprick.
I feel cold, cold through. Not as cold as my poor dear. Her purse is lying on the floor. I pick it up to go through it. The piece of paper I expect is folded neatly inside, written on a Channel 11 memo. Her job at Channel 5 was to begin October. I memorize the doctor’s name and address before I burn the paper at the gas stove and wash the ashes down the sink. That doctor may or may not have failed to save her, but it is the law who killed her: the people who make the laws that try to force us to bear unwanted babies and force us into crudely botched abortions instead, the legislators and the judges, the people who pressure the lawmakers, the people who enforce the rotten laws. I will not help them. I will not open her to them. I put the purse back where I found it. Suddenly I realize I should call Howie. I am still telling him when the buzzer sounds. “That’s the police,” I say. “I’ll call you back.”
“I’ll come right down…. Or should I? Being a medical student, they might think I’m implicated.”
“I’ll call you back.” I am numb.
They are two voices. I can barely distinguish the police detectives although I know the roles they play are distinct. Too much fog. I stand by the stove where I don’t have to see her. Minouska is cowering under the table. The questions rise before me like large carp out of a cold somber place where no light ever shines. I hold myself, chilled to the heart.
“No, she didn’t say anything to me. I gave her the key because she offered to feed my cat while I was in Detroit seeing my parents.” I show them the plane ticket stub. They look at it very carefully. “The cat used to be her cat, before she got married. I took the cat from her.” I show them Minouska cowering. “No, it was in Ann Arbor. No, she never mentioned being pregnant to me. No, I don’t believe she was having an affair. She was very much in love with her husband. Her cousin, yes. Didn’t I say that?”
Then a second set of police arrive, apparently in response to whatever Peter did after I called him. They are even more suspicious of me than the first batch, and carefully examine my plane tickets. I hear one of them calling in the next room to verify I took the plane. “I went with my …” I start to say boyfriend, then change to fiance. That sounds respectable. “We were visiting our parents—they all live in Detroit—to tell them we’re getting married.”
“Let’s have his name and address.”
They go through her purse, they go through my drawers, they read the papers on my desk, questioning me about my poems. That I write poetry seems suspicious to them and my stock sinks again. “No, she didn’t usually have a key. I gave it to her when she offered to feed my cat while I was in Detroit. I gave her the key last Friday. No, we didn’t leave until Saturday, but she doesn’t come into the city on Saturdays. My parents can confirm I was in Detroit constantly from Saturday at four when they met us at the airport. No, I left my boyfriend at the East Side Airlines Terminal. We took the bus from the airport together. He went to his apartment, I came home. No, she just said she would feed the cat Monday and Tuesday. I said I’d get home today to feed her in the evening. I left a lot of food out Saturday for the weekend. I’ve known my boyfriend since I was sixteen. No, my cousin.”
It takes
me awhile to understand they ask the same questions over and over because they expect to trap me in some inconsistency. The phone rings. The heaviest policeman answers it. His name is Muenster, like cheese. “It’s for you,” he says. I’m glad. I don’t want to explain that Donna used to get business calls here. “He says he’s your boyfriend.”
“What’s going on?”
“The police are still here. They seem not to believe me.”
“I’ll come down.”
“No. I’ll call you when it’s over.”
He argues with me, pro forma. I know he doesn’t really want to come. He’s exhausted, he has to be up early and he never liked Donna. They were jealous of each other in a quiet unemphatic way. I am wary that in my need to blame somebody, I could blame him because I was in Detroit and not with her.
“Why did she come into the city all the time? Did she have a boyfriend?”
“She had a job.” I explain the job.
“Hey, that’s her. I know her,” says one of the other cops who have come to crawl over the room. “She does the weather on the TV. Channel Eleven.”
“I never watch that. I do Huntley-Brinkley. They’re the best.”
“It’s the local seven o’clock news. She’s a looker. Or she was. Jesus, I didn’t recognize her.”
“Why didn’t you tell us who she was?” Muenster asks accusingly.
“I did tell you. Donna Stuart Crecy…. You never asked me where she worked.”
They are intrigued. The case for the first time holds some interest. “Probably balling some guy down at the studio,” one of them says to the other. To me, “Did she have any special friends down there? Any guys she talked about?”
“No. She liked her job but she didn’t talk a lot about it. She worked because she and her husband needed the money.” They think the crime was the abortion, not her death. I am turning to ice and ashes. Like Donna.
Three of the detectives have retreated into the hall for a conference. My neighbor Conrad is confiding in Muenster: “So with the damn cat yowling all the time I knew something was wrong. I should have called the SPCA.”