And she was managing. She hit the table with her knuckles, thinking, Knock wood Joy doesn’t get sick again, and recalled her plan. As soon as the porch furniture was paid off, in three months, she would invest in a washing machine. The next thing was a car for Ed. And then…well, her plans were mainly for the children. She wanted them to have a rounded education, to have a chance to know what they wanted to do and be in life. She wanted them not to be like her. She wanted them to have a chance to accomplish something.
She had already begun this program, but it hadn’t worked out too successfully. She had enrolled Anastasia in a dancing class while they were living in Jamaica. Anastasia loved it, and was quite good at it, liked to show off her Russian kick and her tap steps and somersaults. But then it was announced that the dancing class was having a show for the first-year pupils. To be in the show, Anastasia needed a new pair of tap shoes—her old ones had become too short—and a costume. Belle couldn’t afford shoes or even fabric, and had to remove Anastasia from the class. Anastasia hadn’t understood why she wasn’t going anymore, and had been unhappy. Belle didn’t want that to happen again.
But Anastasia was playing the piano a lot these days. She would just climb up on the stool and sound out the songs she knew. Belle wanted her to have piano lessons. She knew Anastasia wanted them. The thing was to squeeze the money out of her budget. Now, if she made cheaper desserts, could she save a dollar a week? And then, how to find a teacher?
Anastasia’s first piano teacher was Mr. Califano, who lived a few blocks away and had a sign in his front window. He was sort of fat and getting bald and Anastasia hated him. She hated him because he gave her ugly music to play: her pieces were all by Verdi, from Il Trovatore or La Traviata, and they all had a left hand that went ump-pa-pa and sounded cheap. She complained that she didn’t like these pieces, but he said they were great music. She didn’t believe him, but she was only a child, and couldn’t argue. Also, when she made a mistake, he slapped her hand. No one ever slapped Anastasia, and she did not know how to handle this. She felt insulted. Still, she liked being able to play.
One afternoon when Mommy said, “Wash your hands and go through your lesson, Anastasia, because Mr. Califano is coming this afternoon,” Anastasia made a face.
Mommy stiffened. “What’s the matter? If you don’t want to take lessons, you don’t have to. I told you that. It’s up to you.”
“I know,” Anastasia said meekly. She gazed at her mother. “But I don’t like Mr. Califano.”
But Mommy didn’t get mad. She said “Why?” and Anastasia told her.
“He hits your hand?” Mommy repeated. Then she said, “You don’t have to take a lesson today, Anastasia.”
And when Mr. Califano came to the door, Anastasia hid in the kitchen. She didn’t hear what Mommy said, or what he said. He never came back again, and Mommy found a new teacher for her. But Anastasia felt embarrassed for telling on Mr. Califano. He wasn’t mean or anything; he was just used to hitting children. Her next teacher was Angelo LaMatta, but he said to call him Angie. He had a disposition like his name, angelic, and he was a much better teacher than Mr. Califano. Mommy said he went to Juilliard. He was young and had a sweet face and he gave Anastasia beautiful music to play, Mozart and Beethoven and Bach, not the real Bach, but his son, C.P.E. And that Christmas, Angie gave Anastasia a Christmas present—a year’s subscription to Etude magazine! It was all about music. It was as big as a newspaper, like the Daily News that Daddy brought home every night, but it was bound and had thicker paper. Every month when it arrived, Anastasia would sprawl on the floor, knees in, legs out, and read it carefully. She was often puzzled by what she read, but she persevered. Particularly she did not understand the name of one regular column: “Hemidemisemiquavers.” She tried the dictionary in vain, but deduced after a while that it was a made-up word meaning tiny little notes. Still, she failed to see why anyone would give that name to a column.
Joy started kindergarten. Once she started school, Joy was almost always sick, picking up, as children do, every communicable disease. She came home with measles, chicken pox, and mumps; soon Anastasia caught them too, all except mumps. Belle spent her days tending two sick children and worrying about them and the doctor bills. Joy missed most—five months—of her first-grade year and should have been left back. But her teacher, Mrs. Hoffman, a young woman with dark curls, loved Joy. And, she told Belle, she was being promoted herself, and was to teach second grade the next year, and could not bear to lose Joy, so she promoted Joy too. Also, she added, any child Joy’s age who could crochet was smart enough to be promoted even if she had not done the first-grade work.
Belle had sat with Joy crocheting when the child was recovering, and had patiently taught her how. She was proud of Joy for being promoted after such a year. But in later years, Joy was sorry about it: she never did learn the fundamental work she missed in first grade, and the lack impeded her throughout school.
One evening, when both girls were sick, Daddy and Mommy came upstairs, and Daddy looked very proud of himself. He was carrying a big box full of books. Someone in his company, hearing he had a daughter who liked to read, had given him the contents of a deceased relative’s attic. Many of the books were for children. Anastasia grabbed the box greedily. These books were not as beautiful as those she had, but she had read her own books many times. The most beautiful of her books was A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, which had many pictures in color: there was a little girl on a swing, looking out at a patchwork quilt of fields; and a little boy looking at his shadow; and children sitting in a slice of moon as if it were a boat. Also very beautiful was Pinocchio, but it had only a few pictures, and her first real books, Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Andersen’s Fairy Tales. She had Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; that was all pictures. Mommy’s friend Adele had brought it when she visited Mommy one afternoon last year when Joy and Anastasia were sick in bed; but she didn’t like the story, it was fake. She didn’t really like the pictures either.
But this box held treasures: Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible; Greek Myths (for children); Norse Myths (for children); Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare; Little Lord Fauntleroy; and The Secret Garden. For a month, she immersed herself in these new worlds, and every year afterward she reread them. She was often puzzled by what she read, and would lie in bed mulling it over. She never had problems with the books they were given in school. Those books either taught you something—geography or history or spelling—or they told stories that were intended to teach children to be good, obedient, respectful of their elders, honest, or clean, or fair. These stories were usually silly and fake and Anastasia’s heart dismissed them. She knew children would not behave the way they did in those books. And no one she knew had a governess or lived in a mansion. And all the daddies in the book were so sweet and wonderful, although they might not be around much. But they weren’t anything like the fathers she saw around her. She knew the German butcher across the street beat his daughter, and chained her to the bed at night when he went out; and she could hear the beatings of children in the DiNapoli house on the corner, often, when she walked past. Even Uncle Eric beat Errie with a belt, and so did Lily Wallis’s father, he’d done it once when she was staying with Lily. And fathers who didn’t beat their children, like her own, didn’t have anything to do with them, but just grumbled and grouched at them all the time. There were no mean or violent fathers in the books she read, nor in the fairy tales, either, although there were giants and ogres, and just plain indifferent fathers, like Cinderella’s. The mothers were always cruel jealous stepmothers. They weren’t like the sweet mothers she knew, mothers who protected their children and took care of them.
Fairy tales, myths, and the tales from Shakespeare were not simple and transparent, like the schoolbooks. They bothered her, they kept her awake at night. She could not understand who the Ice Queen was, or why she wanted to kidnap the little boy; or why Daphne was happy to be changed into a laurel
; or why King Lear was so blind about Cordelia. She realized that these stories had been altered for children, things had been left out of them. Reading them was somewhat like listening to grown-ups talk: there was something missing, something essential, that would make all the rest make sense. Like grown-ups, these stories lied to children. She determined that when she was grown up, she would discover the missing part, and go back and read these stories again.
Then there were Mommy’s stories, but they were true. They were all very sad because Mommy’s life had been very sad. The books she liked had that sadness in them too. Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden were about children who felt sad in the ways she, Anastasia, also felt sad, and they were her favorite books. She wondered if her life, like theirs, would move into happiness, but when she thought about it, she couldn’t quite see how. Sometimes, thinking about this late at night lying in her bed by the window staring out at the clouds and the moon, her mind would slide into the world of fairy tales, and she would imagine a fairy appearing in her room and offering her three wishes.
She spent considerable time pondering these wishes, but each time she imagined this fantasy, she came up with the same ones. Actually there was only one wish: that Daddy would make more money. If Daddy made more money, Mommy would be happier and she would love Daddy; and if Mommy loved Daddy, then both of them would love the children, Anastasia and Joy, and then they would be happy too. That’s what Anastasia believed. So sometimes she would nobly tell the fairy she needed only one wish, and that she should give the other two to another child who needed wishes. But other times she felt she should not leave anything to chance, and would take all three: for Daddy to make more money; for Mommy to love Daddy; for Mommy and Daddy to love Anastasia and Joy. She wondered whether, if she could really believe in this fantasy, wish it hard enough, it could come true even without the intervention of a good fairy. But she never could have enough faith to find out. She would give it up, lying there humming a Christmas song popular in the Depression years: “All I really want is this, / Daddy’s smile and Mommy’s kiss; / Let our lives be filled with bliss! / That’s what I want for Christmas.”
Belle worked, watched her children, and planned. It took longer than she had hoped to buy the washing machine—all the doctor’s bills, and a cold winter requiring more coal than she had expected—but eventually she got one. Ed went with her to pick it out. They chose a sturdy round Maytag that stood on four legs and had a green metal body. When it was delivered, Belle stood alone in the kitchen gazing at it, clasping and unclasping her hands. She kept remembering a phrase from a psalm: my cup runneth over.
Now washing was much easier. Now, on Monday mornings, she would gather together all the dirty laundry and sort it into three piles, and then pull the washing machine—it was very heavy, but it had rollers on its legs—from its corner to a spot beside the sink. She removed a wide black hose from inside the machine, attached one end to the sink faucet, and left the other end dangling in the machine. She piled the white things inside the tub, and turned on the hot water, which flowed directly into the machine. She added Oxydol, and when the water was high, Clorox. She removed the hose, put on the lid, and started the motor. While the clothes were washing, she prepared the starch. Then she could sit down and have a cup of coffee and a cigarette.
When the washing was complete, she pulled another hose up from the underside of the machine, and let it dangle in the deep tub of the sink. She drained off the dirty water. The next step was to replace the first hose and pour in clean water to rinse the clothes. She would prepare bluing and pour that in at the same time. When the clothes were rinsed, she repeated the draining process. Now she removed the soggy clothes and put them through the wringer. This was the delicate step. Sometimes Anastasia would help her with the washing, and always Belle would remind her: don’t get your fingers too near the wringer. The wringer consisted of two rubber cylinders and a lever that brought them close together. You would put the piece of laundry in between the cylinders, then turn on the motor, and the cylinders would turn, squeezing most of the water out of the fabric. Each piece of laundry had to be carefully guided through.
When this was done, Belle put the items that had to be starched in the shallow sink, with warm water and starch. Then she began the washing process over again, with the colored things. While they were washing, she took the nonstarched things outside and hung them on the line—undershirts and the girls’ underpants, and white socks. She drained, added rinse water, drained again, and wrung out the colored items. She put those that required starch in the starchy water with the others, and started to wash the dark pieces. But she rarely got this far without stopping to make lunch for Joy and Anastasia, who had to come home at lunchtime except on rainy days, when the school allowed them to bring a sandwich and provided containers of milk.
She would open a can of soup and make a baloney sandwich for them; or scrambled eggs with toast; or a grilled cheese sandwich; or a tuna fish salad. While they ate, she sat beside them, drinking tea, eating toast, and smoking. She would listen to their chatter, but it seemed far away. She was thinking about what she wanted to do for them. She had so many plans. After they left, she finished the dark laundry, and then put all the starched things through the wringer again. At last, she had it all on the line. She always sighed and slumped down in a chair when she had gotten that far. There were still things to do: the washing machine to be wiped down, the sinks to be scrubbed, the starch pot to be scoured: but the worst was done. Thank heavens for her washing machine.
When Belle saw how much Anastasia loved music, she decided to take her to the opera. Belle had never been to the opera herself; neither had Ed. She wanted Anastasia to have that experience. She looked in the newspaper, and found out what tickets cost, figured the price of going into Manhattan, and began to save. She would take the four of them for Anastasia’s ninth birthday, in November. She started saving for it in May.
It also occurred to her that her children had had no exposure to religion, and one day in September, before Anastasia’s ninth birthday, she spoke to her.
Mommy was ironing when I came home and she said, in a formal kind of voice, “Anastasia, sit down, I want to talk to you.”
The way she said it, I knew she wasn’t mad, and that we were going to have a grown-up conversation. I felt honored, and I sat down very correctly, my back straight, not slumped.
“I am not a religious person. That means I don’t believe in God. If you don’t believe in God, you’re called an agnostic. That’s what I am. But many people do believe in God. And I was wondering if you would like to learn about God.”
Learn about God! What else did I think about night after night, lying up there in my bed beside the windows, looking out at the stars and moon, and thinking about how wrong everything was on earth, and wondering how it could be made right!
“Oh, I would!” I breathed.
“Well. There are many different religions. Different people haves different ways of thinking about God, and talking about God. These ways are called religions. Your father and I were raised in the Catholic religion. So I thought maybe it would be best if you went for religious instruction to the Catholic Church. Would you like that?”
My heart leaped.
So intense was my longing for understanding, that even after weeks of studying the catechism I knew to be mindless, to offer euphemisms instead of knowledge, to pretend that saying something made it true, I was still entranced. My devotion was of the furious bloody sort: I believed none of the crap in the lessons I had to memorize but memorized them nevertheless; but I did believe there was a God and that he carried justice within him, and that if I persevered, I would discover that justice. I knew, though, that I would never find it, or God, through the ways urged by the nuns. Even as I followed the rules, learned the venial and mortal sins, learned what the sacraments were, even as I half-accepted these as part of the road to what I was seeking, I knew the rules were too silly to be God’s. And I was
fiercely determined to find the place where truth and justice resided. That—truth and justice—was what the word God meant to me. God did not mean love. Indeed, I didn’t really know what the word love meant. Because I knew my mother and father loved me, but I felt they didn’t. And I knew I loved them, but I hated them too, I mistrusted them and I saw their failings. No one else my age thought their parents had failings. Little communication as I had with children my age, I did know that. Parents might be cruel or violent, but they were always Right. I did not believe my parents were always right; I thought I was.
Still, I wanted at least to understand what I was learning, to the degree it was possible for it to be understood. Much of what I was learning was, I knew, purposeful mystification. But some things should have been clear. For instance, the Hail Mary. The night before religious instruction, Tuesday night, I had to recite my catechism lesson for my mother. I recited every Thursday night too, before the Friday tests with school lessons—I would give her my book, and she would ask me the spelling words or the multiplication tables, and I would spill them out. This evening, I had to recite certain prayers by memory, and when I finished, I said, “Mommy, you know that prayer, the Hail Mary?”
She nodded.
I recited the first stanza: “Hail, Mary! full of grace, / the Lord is with thee; / blessed art thou amongst women; / and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” I recited, using the rhythms we’d been taught. “Well, what does that mean? ‘Fruit of thy womb, Jesus?’ What’s womb?”