Every morning when she woke up and climbed down from her crib, she would pad into the kitchen where Mommy sat drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and Mommy would say “Good morning, Anastasia,” and get up and start to make oatmeal for her breakfast. But Anastasia hated oatmeal, so this did not make her happy. Then she would go into the living room and sit on the floor and color while Mommy cleaned up the apartment. Then, after lunch, Mommy would put on a fresh dress and put powder on her face and lipstick; and put Anastasia in a freshly ironed smocked cotton dress and shoes with little straps on them and white socks and her good coat and hat, and take Anastasia’s hand as they crossed the street and entered the park. After a while there was Joy, and then Mommy did not take her hand anymore, but told her to hold on to the handle of the carriage. Anastasia resented this, and would bristle and say she didn’t need to hold on, she was a big girl.
Anastasia hated the park. Mommy would sit on a bench, looking very elegant in her nice coat and the felt hat with the long feather pointing forward, and the other ladies would come too, with their children, and they would sit together, three or four of them, Mrs. Wallis, Mrs. Goldthorpe, Mrs. Thacker (who was old and had no children), and they would talk and tell the children to play. But Anastasia did not know how to play, and she would watch Lily Wallis and Eleanor Goldthorpe doing silly things and she would go off by herself and sprawl on the grass and make chains out of the little flowers of clover. She would slip them on her wrist as bracelets, but they always broke. She would gaze around her at the great vacant park, the trees, the grass, the side-walked paths, and it yawned at her hostile and empty. There were people in it; children’s voices floated in the air like the sounds of animals, and people walked. But everyone seemed tired and stiff and old; or young and silly and noisy; and Anastasia could not find what she was supposed to do in a place like this.
But after that was over came the one time of day Anastasia loved. She and Mommy—and then Joy was there, too, in her carriage—would walk to Jamaica Avenue to do the marketing. First they went to the butcher shop, which always smelled of blood mixed with sawdust but had lots of meat with different colors—pale pink, almost white, deep red—and lots of baloney and liverwurst, which Anastasia loved, and sometimes Mommy bought some. Then they went to the vegetable store, which was even better—beautiful things piled up in pretty heaps, all shiny purple and red and pale green and orange and yellow. All shapes, the tomatoes and the little green squash, and the shiny pods of peas and lima beans, and wonderful satiny eggplants and apples and lemons. She knew she was not supposed to touch, but it was hard to keep her hands down. She just wanted to stroke the things to see what they felt like, but she couldn’t do it, Mommy said, until they got home. But Mommy never bought most of those things—it was always peas or green beans or carrots or cabbage—Anastasia hated cabbage—and so she never got to feel the others. But she could look at them and smell them, and that was something.
Then came her favorite, Moe’s Butter and Eggs. Moe kept his eggs heaped in a big basket with a handle, and when Mommy bought some, he lifted them one by one with great care and put them into a grey cardboard box. Anastasia loved the way the eggs looked, and the butter too, in huge wooden casks set on their side. When anyone ordered butter, Moe would take a big knife and stab it into one of the casks—the pale yellow or the darker yellow—and cut out a chunk, swish, just like that, and keeping it on the knife, lift it to the scale, where, with his other hand, he had placed a sheet of heavy waxed paper. And he would say, a little less, missus? or, a little more? but mostly the chunks were just what the ladies had said, a half pound. Anastasia was awed by Moe’s skill.
The store smelled wonderful, of fresh butter and pumpernickel bread and crispy seeded rolls. But the most wonderful thing in the store, one of the most wonderful things in the world, Anastasia thought, was the beautiful deep pink fish that always sat on a marble block on Moe’s counter. Sometimes a lady would order some—Anastasia never found out its name—and Moe would take a special knife, very long and thin, and slice, swiftly but carefully, ever so thin slices of this fish, and lay them gently on the heavy white paper. Anastasia pressed up against the glass to watch this. Once she asked Mommy if they could have some, and Mommy gave her an angry look. Outside the store, Mommy whispered that it was too expensive, so Anastasia never asked again. But she continued to wonder what the fish tasted like, so brilliant and vivid pink. Would it taste pink?
Sometimes, after Moe’s, they would go to Anastasia’s other favorite, Fiedler’s Bakery. Fiedler’s was very beautiful: it had a broad glass front window with its name in fancy old-fashioned gold lettering across it, and inside, on shelves of different levels, were trays and stemmed plates, all with pretty paper doilies on them, and on top of the doilies…! Well, everything! Linzer tortes, black-and-whites, Metropolitans with their tiny dollop of jelly inside the cream. And great big layer cakes creamed in white or tan or dark chocolate, and sometimes with pink or green decorations on them. But Mommy never bought layer cakes, she bought long stollens, which perturbed Anastasia because she could not understand why Fiedler’s would sell or Mommy would buy a stolen cake. But stollens were boring, they just had sugar and nuts on them. Or Mommy would buy a crumb square, or a butter cake: Anastasia liked these better, and she always thought of Wally, who would ask Anastasia if she wanted a piece of crumb cake, and would cut a square for her, and then lift the whole rest of the cake onto his plate and look at her and laugh. She laughed too, because she knew it was a joke. Wally never ate the whole cake at once. And once in a great while, Mommy would ask Anastasia what she would like, and then she would panic, moving from one foot to another, incapable of deciding which treat she wanted most. She knew it did no good to point to the layer cakes: Mommy would not buy those. But a Metropolitan? Or a Linzer torte? Or a black-and-white? Or cupcakes? Or brownies? Oh, it was agony, and finally (she knew Mommy was impatient for her to choose) she would just say something, blurt it out, and Mommy would buy it and then she would forget the rest and walk home happily, looking forward to her dessert after dinner.
But once that part of the day was over, Anastasia’s spirits flagged again. They would walk home in silence and Mommy would take off her hat and coat and hang them up and put on an apron and tell Anastasia to go play in the living room because the kitchen was small and she’d be in the way, and she would sit on the floor coloring or drawing and she could hear the tinkle of fork on metal, the scrape of the spoon in a pot and smell frying onions, and her mouth would water. But everything was so still. She would look up from the page and feel the dimness of the room, the silence of the house, into which only this smell entered, offering tantalizing promises of something different—a warm house with the lights turned on, a good dinner, talk and laughter, a grandma who took you on her lap, an uncle who pulled you over for a hug. But then, she had already forgotten these things, the warmth of bodily contact or a sweet voice saying “moja kochana,” people talking and laughing around her, they were buried in a realm so deep she would never again have access to them, and with them went all hope for life lived among folk, rather than isolated, silent, still, empty. She felt she lived alone in a great void which, if it were to contain anything, she herself would have to fill. She would have to make it up. She would lie back across the rug she hated—it smelled dusty, and it was rough against her skin—and daydream.
Then she would hear the front door open and Daddy’s step in the hall, stopping at the closet to hang up his coat or put his hat on the shelf, and then down the hall and into the kitchen, and she would hear his sweet “Hello, Belle,” but Mommy would say nothing, and then she would turn on the radio and call Anastasia, saying dinner was ready, and Anastasia would get up and go in and say “Hello, Daddy,” and kiss his cheek the way he kissed Mommy’s and get up on her chair at the aqua table and begin to trace with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, the designs Daddy had put on its edges, decals, Mommy called them, of peach-colored roses and little pink buds. And no m
atter how good the dinner had smelled, when she sat at the table Anastasia was not hungry, and would poke at it and pick around and ask to be excused, and would go back into the living room and lie on the awful rug and daydream some more until Mommy called her and asked if she didn’t want some dessert. And if they had gone to Fiedler’s that day, and her Metropolitan was waiting for her, she would go back and eat a piece of it that Mommy had cut for her. But if they hadn’t, if the Metropolitan was left over from the day before, she didn’t want it, it didn’t taste good.
Lying on the floor, she could hear the radio, the Evening News with H. V. Kaltenborn, who had a funny high voice and made everything sound as if the world were ending that night. Then there were other programs that Mommy and Daddy listened to, and she could hear the program and the click of their forks and knives on their plates, and sometimes during dinner Mommy would ask Daddy how his day was, and he might say, “Fine, fine,” or he might tell her what the big boss said to him, and then they fell silent again and she could hear the chairs scraping on the linoleum and the plates being stacked in the sink and the radio, and water running as Daddy washed the dishes and Mommy opening the cabinet to put away those she had dried, and then the kitchen light would go off and they would come into the living room and Daddy would sit in the high-backed chair with the wooden arms, the uncomfortable one, and open his paper and Mommy would sit in the corner of the couch, and they turned the lights on, so the room was no longer so dark, but it was still silent as Daddy read and Mommy darned her stockings with a funny needle with a little hook in it, and then after a while Mommy would say it was bedtime, and Anastasia would go into the bedroom and undress in the dark, by the light that filtered through the glass-paned doors, and get into her crib and lie there listening.
And sometimes Daddy would bring the radio into the living room and turn it on there, and they would sit listening. But other times they just sat, silent, for hours, so that Anastasia fell asleep, knowing that she’d been asleep only when she awoke at the smell of tea and toast being prepared, and knew that it was eleven o’clock, and her parents were having their bedtime snack. But she always fell asleep before they actually came into the bedroom and undressed and got into the double bed. She never saw or heard that.
VII
1
BELLE MOVED LIKE A person who has been very ill and is just beginning to walk independently again—as if every gesture had to be planned and executed with deliberation. In her youth, she had been quick of gesture, but now her movements were slow. Only when she was cooking did her hands work swiftly. And sometimes, as she bent for some task, she would raise her head in confusion, unsure where she was. She glanced at her hand: she held a man’s white shirt, damp. What was it and where was she? Her glance fell on a porcelain basin on the tarpaper roof of an apartment building, rose to the scene around her—a sky dotted with dirty clouds, apartments, an elevated-train track. She turned slowly, like an arthritic. In one hand she held this wet shirt, in the other a clothespin. Well, she knew what she was supposed to do with those, and she did it, not bothering, for the moment, to decipher the clues around her. She knew everything would come back. She would bend again: another white shirt, and their some tiny underclothes, a child’s. Anastasia’s. Yes.
She could remember Anastasia, and even Ed, whose white shirt that was, but sometimes she could not recall how she had got from there to here, how her old life, so many years of it, had led her to this rooftop, this clothesline. Dispersed. Everything she had known was gone, dispersed. That was a real word, wasn’t it? How had she learned such an elegant word, being as stupid as she was? It was a fine word. Dispersed. Dispersed. She believed she even knew how to spell it: d-i-s-p-e-r-s-e-d. Brooklyn and the rooftops there, not very different from this one, yet different; Momma, Poppa, Euga, Eddie, Wally; the school where the teacher spoke a foreign language and she was stupid; the streets, the peddlers, the pushcarts, the horse-drawn drays; the sweatshops, the machines, whirrrrrrrr. All day.
They had their photograph taken on the roof of the house on…which one was it? Lorimer Street, maybe. So many streets, so many railroad flats, one worse than the other, the worst of all that terrible one behind the other building, always dark, you had to go outside and into another building to go to the toilet, Momma crying….Dispersed. Yet things were not that different….
No, this thing she had in her hand now, it was a tiny bib, a baby’s. Anastasia was four and a half, it wasn’t hers. It was Joy’s! Yes, the new one, the one who laughed and gurgled and reached out her arms to her mommy, Belle wouldn’t have them say Momma the way she had, Americans didn’t say that. She was American now. Americans lived in this place where she was now, Jamaica. They wore neat hats and high heels and dark wool coats and spoke very precisely without the slightest accent. And the only way they knew she, Belle, was different from them was from her name, Dabrowski, that was a foreign name, Polish. They all had neat American names, Wallis, Goldthorpe, Thacker, Jones. Maybe Goldthorpe was Jewish, but Mrs. Goldthorpe didn’t look Jewish, and neither did Eleanor, her little girl. Belle thought she was American. Jews were like Poles, foreign, they ate black bread with sweet butter and spoke with accents and wore brown sweaters with big holes in the sleeves.
These diapers now, they were Joy’s too. When had she washed them? She must have done it, they were clean. She couldn’t remember. Joy. She wondered what joy felt like. She felt she knew what the word meant even though she also knew she had never felt anything like it: joy. But how could you understand a word denoting an emotion if you have never felt it? Maybe she had. Maybe the day she stole the chruściki and gave one to her little friend she had felt joy. What was her name, that little girl? Dispersed. No, that wasn’t the right word.
Joy felt joy: she was a baby who smiled, not like Anastasia. But Anastasia was a genius, come out of her, Bella, a stupid kid who couldn’t even manage to comb her hair, who couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying, who almost killed her baby sister leading her across a street. How could that happen, a being like Anastasia, who looked at you as if she knew everything you knew and more and yet she was only a child? But she was cruel too. “You don’t love me,” she’d said to Belle, just the other day. When Belle had sacrificed everything, her entire life, for Anastasia; when she had given up all her ambitions, her dreams, her hopes, in order to have this child. Belle had felt unable to speak when Anastasia said that. She had turned away so Anastasia wouldn’t see the lump in her throat. Love? Anastasia would never understand.
Joy would never say a thing like that to her mother, Belle knew it. Joy would grow up the way she was now, smiling and happy, her plump little cheeks pink, her eyes full of laughter. Everyone loved Joy, all the ladies loved her. Belle was lucky. She had had two daughters, just as she would have chosen. She never wanted a son. And here they were, so different, yet both came out of her. That was lucky. Yes, things were a little better.
She bent for the last pieces of laundry. She remembered now. She’d washed it in the deep tub in her apartment, scrubbed it on the board, rinsed it, starched those pieces that needed starch, blued the white things, wrung it out well. It was hard to wring with your hands. It hurt. But she wrung it out well and shook it before she pinned it to the clothesline here on the roof. She had done it well. She always tried to do things well. She wanted to be a proper lady. She didn’t want to lie around crying all day, to cry all the time like Momma. And this afternoon, she would put on her hat and coat and stockings and heels and take the girls to the park, her girls, and say good afternoon to the other ladies and maybe even sit on a bench with them and chat for a while. That was what proper ladies did.
Her feet hurt. They had grown again during her pregnancy with Joy, and she had been able to buy only one new pair of shoes in a larger size, and she kept those for good, she wouldn’t wear them to do laundry in. These were her good shoes from before, black suede with a bow, but they were too small and crunched her toes. All her other shoes were far too small now, and
had to be given away. It wasn’t fair, really, that she had such big feet. She wasn’t tall. Size 8 had been bad, but then she went to an 8 ½ with Anastasia, and now she needed a 9! Such big feet and hands, and thick legs too. Tears began to well in her throat and she stopped and stood very still and erect and breathed deeply.
She…had…to…Have to. Must. What? Hurry. Yes, hurry. Because downstairs. She had to go downstairs. Yes, because the children were alone, alone. Anastasia was grown up, she would know enough not to play with matches or climb up on anything but still…She had reached the bottom of the enamel basin and saw some water lying in it. If she tried to carry it back downstairs, it would swish and spill. But what would happen if she poured it out here, on the roof? Would it leak into someone’s apartment? If they saw a puddle there, would they reprimand her? The superintendent might scold her. That would be devastating.
She picked up the wide basin, big enough to bathe a baby in (and often used for that purpose), and some of the water spilled over the side onto her old good black suede shoes. She walked carefully, carrying it toward the door of the staircase. Then she glanced around. There were many posts with clotheslines strung on them on the roof, and two other women had laundry hanging out. She glanced around, and tiptoed toward another woman’s laundry, and poured the water out on the roof under her wash.
Thinking about her feet and legs had upset her, and she knew she must calm down. She tried not to count as she descended the stairs to her floor, to her apartment 1A, Dabrowski. Counting made her cry. Think about good things, the doctor had said: When you feel you’re going to cry, think about good things. Well, it was a good thing the weather was fair and she could hang the wash outside. Otherwise she had to hang it in the apartment, and duck under it all day long, and the place smelled of Clorox and dampness. And the laundry dripped and she had to put newspaper down under it. It was awful. It was good that the weather was good.