Then Mommy would say “Dinner is ready.” Mommy never asked if Daddy had washed his hands, but Daddy’s hands were always clean. And then they could sit, and Mommy would pass the bowls around, helping Joy because Joy was just a baby. Mommy would cut up Joy’s meat. Daddy used to cut up Anastasia’s but now she was a big girl and could cut it herself. And each one would get some of everything, and then they would eat. It was very quiet. Sometimes Daddy would say something about the big boss, or Mommy would say “Anastasia got a hundred percent in an arithmetic test today,” and Daddy would turn to her and say “Good, Anastasia.” But that was all.
Once in a great while, Daddy would have steam coming out of him: once he told a story about niggers who had ripped out the stairs in a building to make a fire in their stove: he was appalled at that. Anastasia asked “What are niggers?” and Mommy glared at Daddy and said it was a bad word she wasn’t to use and Anastasia said “Daddy said it,” and Mommy said grown-ups could say it but not children and all it meant was people with brown skins. But Anastasia was still horrified by people who would tear out steps to make a fire, and she wondered why people with brown skins would do that. She decided they must have been cold, and if they were, then maybe it was all right, but Daddy seemed to think it was the worst thing he had ever seen. But mostly he said nothing and Mommy said nothing. Anastasia could hear Daddy chewing. He chewed carefully, he chewed each mouthful forty times, the way they did at West Point. He said they should do that too, Anastasia and Joy. But Mommy didn’t have to do it. But Anastasia set her teeth and wouldn’t do it. Neither did Joy. Anastasia hated Daddy’s chewing, it made her feel enraged, crazy, she wanted to scream at him, to pound on the table. But of course she didn’t.
And then, if they had a roast, Daddy never wanted to let them have seconds and Mommy would always make him give it to them and he would carve a tiny piece and practically throw it on her plate and she could feel how he hated her. And she wanted to go to sleep, because she would feel very tired. Her dinner was gone, the best time of day was over, and she hated them, she hated Mommy who turned her cheek from Daddy and Daddy, who hated her and Joy, and yet she knew that Daddy would be happy if only Mommy would let him hug her and Mommy would be happy if Daddy made more money and she knew above all that the love her mother felt for her was there, in the dinner, in the food Mommy gave her, and somehow, although she loved the food, it wasn’t enough.
5
AH, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to make judgments. People do, of course: we make them all the time, running around in the world saying this is good and that is bad, and I suppose, believing what we say. But it’s just so much nonsense. Even the shrinks, who, you’d imagine, would be beyond such things, insist on judgments. My friend Clara wants me to go to a shrink. She took me in hand one soggy sight and led me to the only door left for me, she said. She said I was depressed. That surprised me: Cheerful Nellie, depressed? Of course, I’d spent the entire evening in her apartment crying. I took the hint. She didn’t want to listen to that anymore: who could blame her? And who knows, maybe she’s right. But I don’t want to go to a shrink and be urged to make judgments. Because if you stand somewhere and call it yourself, and judge others according to what they do or don’t do to you or for you, then you can never be better than biased and personal and small. Yes, small. You can’t get the “big picture,” you have no perspective wider than your personal trivialities. And I have spent years of my life trying to get beyond the personal and trivial, to find the universal.
When I stand here looking down the long corridor of my memory to that Depression kitchen, the old gas stove on legs, with a tiny sharp ledge running around it on which I never failed to hit my temple when I went to kiss Mommy goodnight; the old sinks, also on legs, with an enameled metal drainboard covering the deep tub; the cabinet with its glass doors behind which were all our dishes, and the two deep drawers that held flatware and utensils, and the double-doored cupboard beneath that held all our pots, and the door to the pantry, where the icebox was; when I see that wooden table and chairs painted aqua and decorated with floral decals; and the four people sitting on those chairs: she powdered and lipsticked with bobbed marcel-waved hair, in a fresh housedress, a little prim around the mouth, a little tentative around the eyes; he in his white shirt that he wore carefully so it would be clean for a second wearing, and his muscular body and full head of black hair, his innocent boy’s face that rarely smiled; they, the children, thin and gawky, the one all legs, the other a halo of blond hair, restless and uncomfortable, being scolded for putting their elbows on the table: when I see them sitting there in silence, all I want to do is cry. Cry for them all. Cry, cry, cry: I could die crying and still not cry enough to let out all my grief, their grief. For to perceive justly leads only to sorrow.
When you look at them all sitting there, whom will you blame? Her, with her vacant dreams, her artistic aspirations, her energy and hope and her sheer blind trying, years of it, directionless, without help from anyone or anything, narrowed into this, this marcelled hair and powdered face, this neat table with its good food, this small scene, the clean ironed tablecloth, the string beans on which she saved two cents a pound, this sullen pale child in her shabby after-school clothes, this round-faced baby in whose longing face there is already a kind of despair: her entire universe shrunk to this, to providing this meal in this house to these people? Go ahead, blame her. Blame her for her coldness, for her turning away from desire, for her inability to hold, to embrace even the children of her own body: cold bitch. Yes, blame her if you dare, you son of a prick! Who lived out her childhood in emptiness that was the eye of a violent storm, who was never held, never mothered, never once wrapped in warm strong arms so that she felt safe.
Maybe you’d prefer to blame him, the silent expressionless man who hated his children. He was not a terrible father; he never raised his hand to them, not even his voice. He merely walked around in a grumbling fury that was like a storm always raging just beyond them, from which they shrank in fear and forgot even that they longed for him. Blame him, the bastard. A simple man whose emotions had been beaten out of him by a tyrant, who wanted love and closeness and cared about nothing else, and who hated his children because he imagined that the goddess he adored was giving them the affection she denied him. Who loved to use his body and his mind in the ways he could use it, who had highly developed senses and remained open to travel and discovery all his life, who was miraculously capable of happiness, but who narrowed, narrowed, narrowed over the years into a rigid timid automaton. Be careful where you walk, the world is full of banana peels, and no one will pay your hospital bill, and while you are on your back, you will lose your job and your house and of course if you lose those you will also lose your wife….
Perhaps we should blame the children, who are already as limited as their parents—the one a sullen unforgiving furious timid prodigy, the other a sweet, too sweet smiling sickly dependent dependent dependent.
The narrowing of lives, the loss of dreams, are staple enough items in the cupboard of literature. But it is essential to remember what that shrinking feels like. Do you know? Can you imagine? Can you recall the day they first bound your feet? When they were still tiny? And afterward, how you could take only tottering little steps, and every step sent shocks of pain all the way up your leg? And how, certain days, the bones, which were being bent back in on themselves, cried out so fiercely that your mouth uttered it, and others turned to gaze on you with contempt, another ill-tempered female, just like the others. But it happens to all of us, female and male. Our bindings feel intolerable on certain days, when the weather is damp, when the bone is having a spurt of growth, when an image triggers the memory of whole feet….
I try to not-feel. I try to think. About them, us. But I am overwhelmed with feeling—with hopelessness. It doesn’t matter what you do or how you try: the same things happen, over and over and over and over. There is no escape.
VIII
1
THE S
LOW QUIET YEARS of the Depression flowed past; the children grew. Sometimes Belle feared they would not: Joy was often sick, and the only medication for most illnesses was merely aspirin. To these Belle added homemade chicken soup, hot tea with sugar and lemon, Jell-O, soft-boiled eggs, orange juice. Anastasia also came down with the usual childhood diseases, but she bounced back quickly. Joy did not, and lay in bed, eyes glazed with fever, round cheeks flushed, day upon day.
Added to her worry about Joy was her worry about paying the doctor’s bills. Belle would tell Anastasia to watch over Joy and walk up to the corner near the gas station where there was a public telephone, and call kind Dr. MacVeaney who would drive all the way from Forest Hills to South Ozone Park and charge one dollar, which sometimes Belle did not have. Still, he would nod and smile at her understandingly, and say “That’s all right, Mrs. Dabrowski. Next time.” But sometimes she did not have the money next time either. He never pressed her, he never even handed her a bill. She kept track of what she owed him, and always paid it, although it sometimes took her six months.
When she was four, Joy had a terrible ear infection that reminded Belle of her own mastoid infection, and made her fear for Joy’s hearing. Dr. MacVeaney had to lance the infection without anesthetic; Belle stood watching him, Anastasia, also sick, watched from the next bed: the baby did not utter a sound, and when it was over, he stroked her face and she smiled radiantly at her torturer, who told her what a brave and good girl she was. Anastasia saw the expression around her mother’s eyes, and knew Joy was very sick, but Mommy did not hug Joy. She went downstairs with the doctor. Later she brought up a dish of raspberry Jell-O, but Joy was asleep.
Aside from illness, there were few breaks in their routine. Every morning, Belle woke Anastasia for school, and when she had dressed and gone downstairs, there was always the fresh-squeezed orange juice, or half a grapefruit, and, in the winter, hot oatmeal or farina with cream; in the summer, corn flakes with milk and bananas. Anastasia hated all cereals. Sometimes Belle would soft-boil an egg for her, but she didn’t like that either. She only liked pancakes, waffles, and French toast, but they had those only on weekends. She had to eat her breakfast, though, that was a rule. And drink a whole glass of milk, which she hated most of all. She would often persuade Belle to add a little hot coffee to her milk; then she could drink it. But after breakfast was the worst time, because then she had to take her cod-liver oil. Every morning, Mommy made her and Joy swallow a big tablespoon of it. She knew Mommy meant well, that it was good for her, but it tasted horrible. And then she would sit on the high stool while Mommy combed her hair, tears streaming down her face from the hurt of it, and then Mommy made long neat braids and fastened them with a rubber band and matching ribbons. Then Anastasia had a long walk to school. She hated to get up in the morning.
There were small pleasures in their life. In their first spring in the new house, Anastasia watched her mother plant seeds from packets in the flower beds that bordered the yard, and asked if she could have a garden of her own. Belle gave her a long bed, three feet deep, just behind the hedge that separated the yard from the concrete court behind the house. Several boughs of a peach tree in the next yard overhung this bed, and Anastasia studied it as she planted her handful of seeds—marigolds, zinnias, cosmos, cornflower—and weeded them, and watched them grow. In summer, little hard green balls appeared on the branches of the tree. Anastasia plucked one and bit into it: it was sour and hard. But the balls grew larger, and changed color, and she kept watching and asking Belle if the peaches were ready yet, and Belle always said no. Then, just as fall arrived, and it was time to go back to school, there they were, large and golden-red and fuzzy, and heavy, weighing down the branch. Anastasia felt the peach tree belonged to her, and wrote a poem about it in class, which the teacher inserted in the school magazine, The Baisley Inkpot.
Mrs. Carle, who actually owned the peach tree, brought big bags of peaches to the side door and gave them to Belle, who made jam from them, and put it in big glass jars with rubber rings on top, which she stored in the basement. Anastasia liked the peaches, and she liked the jam, but neither quite lived up to her sense of the beauty of those branches, thick with leaves and hanging low, weighed down by golden-red fruit. Nor did her poem express her feelings about this tree. Nothing did, until many years later, when she took a photograph of fig trees on a wild Macedonian plain, and caught something of how she felt about the miraculous beauty of growing food.
When Anastasia’s flowers grew, she picked the best ones, just the blossoms, and went into the kitchen and asked her mother for a jelly glass. They used jelly glasses to drink from, but Anastasia knew they were dispensable.
“I’m going to put some flowers and some sugar in this glass with water, and make perfume,” she announced.
“That isn’t the way you make perfume, Anastasia,” Belle said idly, looking up from the apples she was peeling to make a pie.
Anastasia stiffened. “How do you make it, then?”
“I don’t know. But not that way.”
“Well, if you don’t know, how do you know this isn’t the way?”
Belle put down her paring knife. She sighed. “Anastasia, when you grow up and have a daughter, I hope she is just as willful and stubborn and fresh as you are!”
Anastasia left the room haughtily, and continued with her experiment. She slid the flower-sugar-water solution under the back porch, where it was dark and damp, she decided four days would do it. But she forgot about it and a week passed before she took it out, put her face close to the glass, and inhaled deeply. The stench was so terrible she almost vomited. She poured out the solution, and carried the glass back into the house. Her mother was peeling carrots for vegetable soup.
“I just wanted to tell you you were right about the perfume,” Anastasia announced and left the room.
Belle shook her head and grimaced. She did not understand how she could have given birth to so proud and headstrong a daughter. Only six, and so willful. Just last week, when Belle was making a lemon meringue pie, had finished piling the white froth on the custard, the pie was in the oven, Anastasia came into the kitchen. She saw the eggbeater in the bowl, traces of the white froth in it.
“Oh, Mommy, can I lick the bowl?” she cried.
“No, Anastasia.”
“Why not!” Such dismay! About such a thing!
“It isn’t whipped cream. You wouldn’t like it.”
Oh, those eyes. She examines my face as if she thinks she will find some answer there. She acts as if I am lying to her. What is the matter with this child? I would never think of questioning my mother. If she said something, that was it. But Anastasia! She clamors, she insists, she says it is too whipped cream, if it isn’t, what is it? So, finally, to show her, I say “All right, Anastasia, go ahead.” Sighing.
And she gleams at me as if she’s won something, what goes on in her head? The look on her face at her first taste of that egg white! Hah. She learned her lesson.
What did I do to deserve a child like that?
Belle’s long days of labor required little of her mind except finding efficient ways of doing her work, and while she ironed, or peeled vegetables, or cleaned the house, her mind had little to work on. She listened to the radio. Ed had hooked up a speaker from the radio in the living room so she could hear it in the kitchen. He had even put a switch in the wall so she could turn it on or off from the kitchen. She listened to Arthur Godfrey—she loved him—and Mary Margaret McBride, who was her favorite, and to a few soap operas. But they often seemed stupid to her, and she would turn them off and daydream.
She thought about what it would be like if Ed got another job and made more money. The other men she knew were prospering. Jean’s husband, Eric, was head of a department in his insurance company now, and made so much money he was able to help some of his friends. And of course, Jean still worked too, because she had Momma to help in the house and take care of the children. She now made high-fashion hats for Lily Daché
, and once in a while she would make one for herself, a really smart little hat. And occasionally, when they played bridge together, Jean would whisper to Belle that Eric had another raise, but Belle could see without being told that they were comfortable. They had all new furniture, and Jean had nice clothes, and they had a telephone and a new car every few years and their children’s shoes were never too small for them. At Christmas, Jean and Eric’s children got so many presents you would think you were in a store.
And her brother Eddie was doing nicely too. He and Martha would drive down from Boston each Christmas in a nice car, and Eddie and Eric would sit together discussing cars while Ed sat listening in silence. Once in a while, Eric would ask Ed’s opinion of a certain model of car, but Ed couldn’t say much because he wasn’t informed about new cars. She knew Ed would love to have a car again. She decided that would be the first thing they would get if he got a raise—not a new car, but a used one. After a washing machine.
Even Wally made good money when he worked. God knows what he did with it, he spent little. He lived in boardinghouses near whatever job he was working on, and when the wiring for that building was finished, he’d get another job elsewhere, through the union. He often came to visit Jean or Belle, sleeping on their living room couches, and spending his days reading the Daily News. There was something sad about Wally, Belle felt; something homeless and yearning. But she had no patience with that: why didn’t he make himself a home somehow? He had enough money, didn’t he? Still, he was good: whenever he came, he gave her a few dollars toward food, and he always went up to the bakery and bought a crumb cake and some rolls. And he loved Anastasia.
Oh, Ed was doing all right. But he inched along, getting two-and three-dollar raises a year, not enough to keep up with the growing demands of growing children. But whenever Belle brought up the subject of looking for another job, he looked so pained and if she kept talking after a while he would start to belch. She knew he felt he was lucky to have a job at all. Of all the families on their block, only a few of the men had jobs. Mr. Carle was superintendent of an apartment building; there was the German butcher; and Mr. Schinkel, Mr. Leifels, and Mr. Costello had jobs: the rest were unemployed as far as she knew.