Yes, and when the weather was bad it was uncomfortable to take the girls for their walk in the afternoon. She wouldn’t do it in bad weather if she could think of anything else to do with them. She would bundle Joy under many little woolen blankets and the leather protector that covered the top of the carriage, and put up an umbrella and try to get Anastasia to stay under it, and they would go out whatever the weather. But it was hard to hold an umbrella and push the carriage at the same time, although Anastasia loved to push the carriage, but she couldn’t get it up and down the curbs…. So it was good the weather was good.
What else was good? Joy was a good baby, she rarely cried. And Anastasia was good too, she had stopped asking questions all the time, driving Belle crazy. And she, Belle, had a nice hat and coat and good new black suede shoes and when she went to the park, she looked as neat and nice as any of the other ladies, and they could not tell she was poor, poorer than they, poorer than anyone else she knew. No, she could conceal that. That was good.
By this time she had reached her apartment, and unlocked the door. She walked down the short dark hall to the kitchen and put the basin on the dish drain and wiped it dry with a dishcloth. She took off the old suede jacket she had worn to hang clothes in, and shook her head a little because her hair felt damp. Then she went to check on the children. Anastasia was lying on the living room floor as she often did. “Hello, Mommy,” she said, and sat up.
“Hello, Anastasia,” Belle said, on her way to the bedroom to check on Joy. Joy was still asleep in her little crib. Belle left the bedroom and went back to the kitchen, passing Anastasia without speaking. She was tired. She turned up the gas flame under the old aluminum drip coffeepot. There was some coffee left from breakfast. She would have a cup, and smoke a cigarette and relax a little. She let herself down in a chair and sighed. That would be good.
The silent months in Jamaica were broken by a few events so striking that they pierced the curtain of ice Anastasia felt had dropped around her. Sometimes, in the morning, when Mommy was washing or cleaning the house or taking care of Joy, Anastasia would put on her hat and coat and run outside with a ball and bounce it in the courtyard. Occasionally, she would venture to the sidewalk and gaze across the street at the park. The park was big and green, and it had a fence around it made of tall iron spears. Anastasia thought it looked like the fences around castles, although she had never seen a castle, and wondered how she knew that. Probably she had seen a picture, she thought. In the middle of the park was a bandstand, white wooden trelliswork with a peaked roof, and sometimes there were musicians sitting inside it playing band music, which was different from other music.
One day something was happening in the park, and Anastasia abandoned her ball bouncing and walked to the very edge of the sidewalk, as far as she dared to go. There was band music and many people in the park, some carrying flags. She wanted to run inside and ask Mommy why all the people were in the park, but she knew Mommy would be tired. So she remained where she was and tried to answer her question for herself. She moved from foot to foot as she stood there, because her Mary Janes were too small for her and they hurt her feet. She had a new pair Mommy had bought her for Easter, but they were for good. She tried to stand on tiptoe to see farther into the park, but that hurt her feet even more.
Then a very fat man with a bulbous red nose came out of the wide park gate and started to cross the street. There were cars parked all along the curb, and as the fat man stepped into the street, one of them backed up and squeezed him flat against the car on his other side. Anastasia cried “Oh!” and put her hands up in front of her eyes. There was blood in her eyes, blood on her hands. Blood. She tore back into the house, to Mommy.
“Mommy, Mommy! Come and see! A fat man got scrunched into a thin man between two cars. There is blood, Mommy!” she cried. She tugged at her mother’s hand. But Mommy was tired. She was sitting at the table feeding Joy cereal.
“I can’t come now, Anastasia,” she said in her tired voice.
Anastasia jumped up and down. “Please, Mommy, please come! There’s blood!” (Would the fat man’s fat all come out in one lump like from a lamb chop?) “Mommy, a man got squeezed!”
“I’m busy now, Anastasia,” Mommy said. “I’ll come later.”
But Anastasia knew that later the man would be gone. She whimpered a bit, and stood there like a reproachful presence, but Mommy went on feeding Joy. Anastasia knew that if she cried or yelled, Mommy would talk to her in the very tired voice that sounded angry. She hung around the kitchen. She wanted to go back and see, but she wanted to go holding Mommy’s hand, she didn’t want to go out there again alone. But Mommy wasn’t coming. She trudged back out, tentatively, and went slowly toward the edge of the sidewalk.
There was a big crowd of people around the place now. She could not see the man anymore. She couldn’t see over the heads of the people. She couldn’t see the blood. Maybe it hadn’t happened. She slumped back into the house, and went into the living room and lay on the floor. She lay on her back so she wouldn’t have to smell that horrible dusty smell of the carpet. She stared at the ceiling. What if the man had cried out asking for help when the car hit him? He was dead, he must be dead, and he wouldn’t know that people had come and tried to help him. He would cry out and believe that no one came to help him.
Anastasia knew how that felt. She could remember the night she woke up and Mommy and Daddy were not home. She could not see Joy’s cradle, either. The apartment was dark except for the light in the front hall. She called out, but no one answered. With the thought that she was alone came terror. She was paralyzed, too frightened even to get out of the crib and go into the next room and find them. She was too frightened even to get out of the crib and walk across the room to see if Joy’s cradle was there on the other side of Mommy and Daddy’s bed.
She knew where they were. They had gone upstairs to Mrs. Thacker’s house to play bridge. Mrs. Thacker was a retired schoolteacher, and Mommy respected her very much, Anastasia knew from the way she talked to her and about her, with reverence. Mrs. Thacker was an educated person; she had white hair that was sort of blue, and she was very nice, but she didn’t like Anastasia, she liked Joy. Joy always smiled and Anastasia always frowned, that was why Mrs. Thacker didn’t like her. But Anastasia couldn’t help frowning, because…she didn’t know why. Mrs. Thacker always smiled and held her arms out to Joy and took her from Mommy and said “goo” and “coo” and the other silly things people said to babies. That made Anastasia frown more. But she didn’t really understand why, because Anastasia didn’t want those things said to her.
Mrs. Thacker had a gentleman friend called Mr. Howells, and they sometimes played bridge with Mommy and Daddy. And that’s where they were. They’d gone up there without her, leaving her alone, but they’d taken Joy with them in her cradle. That’s what had happened.
Thinking about this made Anastasia cry. She called out Mommy’s name, called and called, cried it as loud as she could, shrieked it. But no one came. Mrs. Thacker lived upstairs, directly above their apartment but on the third floor, and Anastasia was sure she could hear them all up there talking and laughing. They would have something good to eat. She could hear their forks scraping the china plates as they finished their pie. She could smell the coffee. She could hear the ice clinking in glasses of ginger ale. She screamed and screamed. She worked the crib as close to the window as it would go, and pushed her head back against the bars and screamed. Although at other times she could easily stand and get out of the crib—she was four and a half years old, after all—this night she could not find the courage to do what she knew she could do: get up, leave the apartment, climb the stairs to the third floor, knock on the door, and insist on being taken in.
She knew she could do this, but somehow she could not. Her fury mounted, with herself, with them, and she screamed without end for ten minutes or more, until her throat was sore. No one came. No one heard. Mommy loved Joy more than she loved Anastasia, because Joy
smiled and giggled and was ticklish, and Anastasia frowned. Anastasia knew that her frowning made people dislike her. But she could not stop it, she would not stop it. To stop frowning, to smile as Joy did, she felt, would be some terrible act, an interior collapse. She kept screaming, until, exhausted, she fell asleep. But she heard Mommy and Daddy come in. Suddenly unafraid to sit up, she did, as she heard them talking in the living room and saw the lights come on again. When Mommy opened the glass door to the bedroom, Anastasia cried out reproachfully:
“You went out without me!”
“Oh, Anastasia,” her mother said in her tired voice, “we only went out for a little while. You’re a big girl now, big enough’ to stay alone for a little while.”
Anastasia lay down again and mulled that over. She was a big girl, practically grown up. She couldn’t tell Mommy she was frightened, that she didn’t want to stay alone, that she wanted some pie, that she was hurt that they took Joy and left her. She didn’t know how to say any of those things, and if she said them, Mommy would think she was just a baby. And Mommy didn’t have respect for babies, Anastasia knew that. She knew it from how Mommy said, “Oh, Joy is just a baby,” when Anastasia complained about Joy. To be a baby was contemptible. To be a big girl was good, deserving of respect.
Still, Anastasia didn’t like being left like that, and she didn’t know how to work that out. If you were a big girl, you didn’t mind being left. She could have got out of the crib and gone upstairs. That was something a big girl would do, wasn’t it? But she was too scared. Why was that? She was a scaredy-cat, Anastasia, a baby. She closed her eyes, her thin arms stiff along her sides, and fell into a dark haunted sleep.
When Anastasia was almost five, Mommy told her that Dr. MacVeaney had said she had to have her tonsils removed. To do this, she had to go to the hospital, to Mary Immaculate, the big hospital up there at the top of the hill behind the park. It wasn’t far away, Mommy said, and Mommy would go with her.
Anastasia said no.
Mommy said that tonsils were things that grew in the throats of little children and had to be removed before they grew up. Had Mommy’s tonsils been removed? Oh yes, but not until Mommy was a big girl, much older than Anastasia, and then it was terrible, it hurt so, and it left Mommy weak and sick for days. It would not be bad if Anastasia would go now, while she was still little.
Less forcefully, Anastasia said no.
Mommy said the doctor said she had to go. And it would be nice there in the hospital. There were lots of big ladies in white dresses called nurses who did nothing all day but take care of little girls like Anastasia. And afterward, when the tonsils were out, Anastasia would have ice cream.
“Could I have peach?” Peach was her favorite flavor, but she rarely had it because Dixie cups came in vanilla and chocolate, and pops were vanilla with hard chocolate outside, and even Mello Rolls only came in vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. To have peach you had to buy a carton of ice cream, the expensive kind where the man took a silver scoop and dug into a big tub and scraped the ice cream into a container and it smelled so delicious, and you took it home and scooped it into bowls. She had hardly ever had peach.
Mommy promised her she could have peach, but even then Anastasia was not convinced.
“Would I sleep in a big bed?” That she, at nearly five, was still forced to sleep in a crib was humiliating to her. They could not fit a bed into the bedroom, Mommy said. She had to sleep in a crib until they moved to a bigger house. But someday Anastasia would sleep in a bed, Mommy had promised.
Mommy said, “Yes, you will have a big bed.”
So Anastasia agreed to go to the hospital. They packed a little valise and Daddy walked her up the hill to Mary Immaculate while Mommy stayed with Joy. And then Anastasia found herself on a hard funny bed on wheels, and the room was cold, and they wheeled her into another room that was even colder and all white and it had big lights on the ceiling and Anastasia didn’t like it. And they lifted her from the bed on wheels to another bed just like it, but without wheels. And then Dr. MacVeaney was standing over her, smiling and saying her name. There were ladies there too, in white dresses, but they didn’t like little girls at all, Anastasia could tell. Mommy was wrong. But how could Mommy be wrong? She knew everything. She must have lied. The ladies wanted to put something over her face and she tossed her head so they couldn’t, and Dr. MacVeaney stopped them. She loved Dr. MacVeaney then, and she thought she would ask him to take the straps off her wrists and ankles so she could move. But he said, “Anastasia, I want you to count to a hundred.”
“No!”
“Oh, go on. Do it for me.”
“No!”
“Oho!” he smiled. “I’ll bet you don’t know how!”
“I do so! I do know how!”
“Well, you’re going to have to prove it to me.”
So, Anastasia, all against her will, had to start to count. But, you know, he was lying! He didn’t care if she knew how to count to a hundred or not, because before she could get past ten the nurse had put the mask over her nose and mouth and she had to stop because she couldn’t think anymore. And she wondered why he had challenged her if he didn’t really want to know if she could count to a hundred or not.
When she woke up, Mommy and Daddy were sitting in chairs and she was lying IN A CRIB! She felt too sick to raise her head. There was a kidney-shaped metal dish beside her face full of blood, and her throat hurt. And she felt awful, but still, she raised her head and yelled, she screamed as loud as she could with her throat so sore, “You promised me they’d put me in a bed!”
And even though she was yelling, Mommy didn’t get mad, she only smiled and said they’d move Anastasia to a bed the next day. But Anastasia didn’t believe her, or only half believed her, and her head fell back against the mattress. Her throat hurt too much or she would have cried. She wanted to cry: she hated being little, why did people treat children the way they did, she wanted to be grown up, but she was helpless, sick, and her throat hurt and Mommy was laughing at her.
They never moved her to a big bed, but before she could protest, she came home. She was lying on the couch in the living room, and Mommy was bringing her a bowl of ice cream, peach ice cream, and Anastasia’s heart leaped, oh that part was true, anyway. She sat up when Mommy handed her the bowl, and lovingly spooned some ice cream into her mouth. But her throat screamed at the coldness, it hurt so much she couldn’t even taste the delicious flavor. She tried again, and then put the bowl on the floor beside her.
“I’ll eat it later,” she said to Mommy. “My throat hurts.”
And Mommy took the bowl and put it on top of the piano and said Anastasia could have it later. Anastasia slid down on the couch and fell asleep. She knew she would never have the ice cream. By the time she was feeling better, Daddy had eaten it. He had to or it would have melted, Mommy said. Anastasia could have ice cream some other time. Peach. But she never did, not until much later, when she had almost forgotten the tonsillectomy. And she already knew all this when she slid down on the couch and went to sleep; she was thinking that it was so and that she had always known it was so: that grown-ups lied to children, that you could not trust them, that they all lied all the time. She hated that, and she hated them, and she hated being little, a child, a person who could be lied to. She would never forgive them, any of them who lied to her. And when she was grown up and had children, she would never never never lie to them, never.
A psychological theory published long after Anastasia had become an adult asserted that trust must be developed early in life or it never would. By the time she read this, Anastasia had forgotten all about tonsillectomies and cribs versus big beds; even her own children were past such concerns. She decided, as she read Erikson, that all the qualities necessary to a full rich adult life existed in her. It was true, she recalled, that she had had moments of distrust; but she had just as many, far more, even, of trust. After all, every afternoon when she came home from school, wasn’t her mother there?
(Except one terrible time during a hurricane, and then she was out searching for Anastasia.) Wasn’t there always food, wasn’t there always a warm house, didn’t Daddy fix things that got broken? She knew she had hated her parents at some time, but that was merely adolescent rebelliousness, they were good people and had given her all they had to give. It wasn’t their fault if they could not give more, was it? And anyway, all children had complaints about their parents.
It was Easter Sunday, 1964, and Anastasia had prepared a big dinner for her parents, her children, Toni, Pani Nowak, and some friends, in her small apartment. They had had to eat in the kitchen, but thank heavens, Toni and Arden and Billy had helped with the cooking, and her friends said the meal was wonderful. Mother rarely praised a meal. After dinner, they had embarked on a series of games.
It was Ellie who led this. He knew all the games there were, and some no one else had ever heard of, and he had Lee and Drew and Courtney and Toni and Arden and Billy and Arden’s friend Kai, and even little Franny totally involved. Dad never got involved in games, he just sat on the sidelines listening. He’d participate only if they needed a timekeeper or a referee. Mom wanted to play, but she couldn’t hear, so she would wave them away with her mouth pressed together tightly, but her eyes looking superior and aloof. By the time Anastasia had got the kitchen in some kind of order, and dried her hands and come into the living room with a fresh drink, Mom was yawning and Dad was looking at her to see if she was ready to leave. But she didn’t look up at him, and she hadn’t yet stood up.
Ellie was talking about trust games that they played in his psychodrama classes—where you lean back and hope someone catches you, or jump up into their arms. And there was Drew, all four feet nine of her, standing with clenched teeth ready to catch Courtney, whose six-foot-two lanky frame was slowly bending backward dangerously. Everyone was howling already, even though it hadn’t yet happened, and when it did, when Courtney reached the point of falling, Drew managed to push herself up against his back and hold him there, her shoulder against his spine, her arm thrown over his stomach. And everyone clapped except Mom and Dad, who gazed on this the way nursemaids might gaze at their small charges playing in mud, with glazed eyes expressing amazement at the things people will do.