“What’s the matter, Anastasia?” Annoyed angry voice.
“I had a bad dream, a nightmare,” I whimpered. “A woman was going to kill me.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she exclaimed. “Did you wake me up for something that stupid? Go to sleep!”
But I couldn’t go back to sleep, I was too terrified. I knew the figure had been my mother, but I couldn’t accept it. Why should I dream so about my mother, my good mother who gave me everything, the mother who had bound me to her by sacrifice, whose wish was my wish, whose will my will.
Yet another strand of thought lived in my head, out of touch with this one, like two different people inhabiting the same space but never touching. For I knew why I had stood with my father. It wasn’t even really that I was standing with him, because part of me knew he’d prefer to have me go to her: he didn’t want her to be any more angry with him than she already was, and he knew, he utterly knew her jealousy, her possessiveness. (How? This man so emotionally dead?) I stood with him for myself. I stood with him because I had somehow understood that he loved the lady on the boat, and Mother was angry about that.
It was stupid for him to introduce her to the woman; he humiliated her. But she humiliated him in return by walking away so abruptly, by making him beg, by forcing him to recognize who was primary in his life. All that—his gaucherie, her revenge—seemed secondary, even unimportant. What mattered was that Belle did not love Ed and turned a cold cheek to him every night of his life. Every night of my life since I was a small child I watched her do this; and every night in all those years, my stomach had churned at the sight. I knew how he felt. (How?)
So he had found someone else who would love him: why not? Mother couldn’t help it if she didn’t love him, but she didn’t have the right to keep him from finding love with another lady. And that lady’s face had lighted up when she saw Daddy, she was smiling with her eyes as well as her mouth. Mother didn’t have to love him herself, but then she had to let him love somebody else. That was the way it seemed to Anastasia.
All so long ago, yet it feels almost as if time were suspended there interminably, as if that moment had never passed. In a sense, perhaps it hasn’t, for me. It passed for them long ago. They have forgotten or forgiven, whichever it is one does. But I have not. I have to laugh at myself, standing there courageously, standing opposed to my mother, standing for body and hugs and warm closeness, standing for sex. For I no longer stand for those things. I have become my mother. I am just like her now: I pull away from embraces, I offer quiet smiles and coldness emanates from my body. I am the ice queen of my fairy-tale book. I am stiff and yield to no hugs. I do not want it anymore, closeness of any kind.
Oh, I tried it. But I gave it up. My mother just gave it up earlier in life than I did. I know all about love and I don’t want it. It hurts too much.
5
IT WAS WHEN HE didn’t eat his dinner that she knew. All those nights he ate his dinner when he came home, no matter how late it was. She had never known Ed to pass up a meal. Even if he’d had a sandwich at five-thirty, he was happy to see a plate piled high with steaming food when he came home at midnight. So it was ridiculous of him to claim that the reason he wasn’t hungry was because he’d had a sandwich at six. He knew that she knew he often had a sandwich and still ate his dinner. The only explanation had to be that he had already eaten a full dinner, and how did that come about?
She’d had suspicions. He wasn’t as…importunate. Of course, he was tired, working these long hours, but that hadn’t made much difference in the beginning. He was still always at her. Until recently. And a couple of times, she had tried to figure out his pay envelope: fifty-six dollars a week, with time and a half for overtime. It didn’t work out right, and when she asked him, he just shrugged. He said maybe they didn’t pay him for all his overtime, and she started to get indignant, to tell him to complain, but then she stopped. She fell silent.
She began to sit in the porch in the dark, smoking, waiting for him. All these years. Anastasia was twelve. Scraping and scrimping, pinching pennies to put a good meal on the table, to give them decent clothes, to keep the house looking good. All up to her, all of it. He handed her his pay, that was the end of his responsibility. In all those years, he’d never once taken her out to dinner, or even to lunch, but now he could afford to take someone else out….
All this shabbiness all these years. Oh, how I hate it! How I have tried to ram him full of my dreams, my energy, so he’d get out there and make something of himself, always your humble servant, no get-up-and-go. And I haven’t complained, I just went on stretching every dollar to hold a palmful of rain. I slave and he hums and goes outside and works on his car, tinkers from dawn to dusk, he doesn’t care, he’s happy. He gets what he wants.
All of what he wants. What’s the matter with him that he doesn’t know I know? Five nights a week he “works late,” and three of those nights he comes home and eats the dinner I keep warm for him, and twice a week he doesn’t. So he’s taking her out to dinner twice a week. How could I not know? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH HIM?
So what I am now is a maid in a housedress who cooks for him, keeps his house clean, irons his shirts and underwear shorts and pajamas and handkerchiefs, irons them beautifully and lays them carefully in his drawers like precious things. And watches him and worries and tells him when he needs a new suit, and goes with him to pick it out because he has no taste.
No taste, only appetite.
Maybe I could even understand that, forgive that. I know I don’t feel the same way he does. It’s one thing for him, he’s always so full of it, but it’s another thing for me, look where it gets you, I can’t do it without remembering, without feeling it all again, the shame, the awfulness of having your body blow up like that, then the baby, crying, crying…and who had to take care of it? Not him. And no matter how many there were, it would be my job to find a way to feed them while he went on happily doing his little job, bringing home his little pay, handing it to me as if it were the crown jewels….
And anyway, how can you do it, let yourself feel it, when you’re sick with worry about the bills; they turn off the gas and the electricity. And poor little Joy, so sick, so sick, her face flushed with fever smiling up at me, “Hi, Mommy,” and so weak I’d have to hold the bowl of chicken soup myself and feed it to her by spoonfuls. I thought she’d die. The good die young. But that can’t be true because my father died young.
He doesn’t care about the girls, like all men, only interested in his own fun. Grumbling at them, their little faces turned up to him so hurt, so pale. He’d be just like my father if I’d let him. They mean nothing to him. If I died, he’d probably abandon them, mistreat them. He’d find another woman, that would be all that would matter and she’d abuse them, use my good dishes and my crystal goblets and my silverware, not caring. He wouldn’t even notice, and if they were unhappy, he wouldn’t care. Only for a hot meal and a woman in his bed.
I bet he took her to a real restaurant, with white cloths on the table and a rose in a little vase and a waiter with a napkin over his arm. Picking up the menu. What would it say? You could choose whatever you wanted, a long list probably. Maybe they even have a glass of wine. I’ll bet he was charming, he can be charming to women, he loves women. Maybe they even had dancing there, the way they used to years ago. Supper clubs. Tea dances. We went dancing once or twice, years ago. I used to love to dance.
But I’m old now. He’s still young, he’s not like me, things don’t weigh on him. Why couldn’t he do that with me? Maybe I’d feel different. Give me his pay and say, “Belle, buy yourself a new dress and let’s go out to dinner on Saturday night.” Oh God, if he ever said such a thing! But I’m just his mother, his servant, the maid. I can’t blame him for wanting some fun. I’d like some fun too.
What I can’t forgive is his assuming I don’t know, his not realizing that I’d have to know. I wonder who she is. Young. She works in his department, I think. A secretary. Pr
obably pretty, spends all she earns on clothes. The way I did. How would she like to take care of this house and market and sweep the floors and mop and dust and vacuum and scrub that old linoleum in the kitchen and do the laundry and cook the meals? How would she like to spend her days that way, watching over two children, one sick all the time, well she can have it, I’d change places with her, let her be me and I’ll take her job and spend my money on clothes and go out to dinner with married men….
Belle dragged deeply on her cigarette, and tamped it out in the ashtray, then jumped, startled by a voice. She turned quickly to see a pale figure in a white nightdress standing a few feet away from her. A pale faceless form in the moonlight. Anastasia, calling her, calling her, demanding, always demanding….
Anastasia was talking. She was attacking her, her, Belle, her mother! She was saying cold cruel things! Blood pulsed in Belle’s temples, Anastasia looked red, blood mounted around Belle’s heart, she wanted to kill. With all she suffered, with all her sacrifice, with everything she did for those children, her whole life given up for them, here was this spoiled selfish child criticizing her! She tried to hold herself back. She turned away.
“Go to bed,” she said as calmly as she could.
Cruel selfish brat: screaming now, protesting! How could she! When as it was, Belle barely managed to go from day to day…. She would never have dreamed of speaking to her mother like that, how dare she how dare she….
Belle stood and walked to the child and slapped her. She was hysterical, that was the trouble. Anastasia stopped speaking. Belle returned to her chair and lighted a cigarette. Alone. Alone in gloomy isolation, a dark pit of suffering, in agony. She had never had anyone, and she never would. All of them out there with their puny desires, their selfish wishes, incapable of understanding. And she was here, in the darkness, her whole body torn by claws of wild animals, and all they could do, those who claimed to love her, those who were supposed to help, all they could do was add their clawings to her scars, scrape and shriek against her skin, oh what had she done to deserve such pain, and how could she go on living?
In the spring of 1943, Frances died. She was ill only briefly, and the doctor ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of death. When it was over, he came out wiping his hands, and spoke to Eric.
“The old lady was a real tippler, eh?” he laughed.
Eric was startled. “She never had a drink in her life!”
The doctor shrugged. Frances had died of cirrhosis of the liver. That’s what he said.
Belle said something else, but only to herself. She said nothing to Ed, or Jean. Belle said she had died of grief.
Perhaps. For when had she had a life of her own? Her children “bettered” her by moving her to the house on Manse Street, which was a nice enough house, but far from any neighborhood where she might have heard Polish spoken, or made a friend. There was no old neighborhood for her: they had moved too often, and she had worked too hard to make enduring friendships. Her family, which had abandoned her when Michael died, was also dead or distant now. She devoted herself to her children as she had to him, became their slave, servant, caretaker. She knew no other way of life.
Then all the children had left and she was there in a house full of strangers, except Jean. She was a maid, an affectionately treated servant in her son-in-law’s house. She was not paid for her labors; she was given room and board with a few pennies spending money. She raised the grandchildren as she had her own children, never raising her voice or protesting. She worked, she served. And she was rewarded: they moved to a huge house in Locust Valley, a place with no sidewalks, no trolleys, no buses, and no Polish people. She worked, she slept in her room, the little maid’s room beside the kitchen. She smiled, she nodded agreeably, she knew her place.
She said nothing when she read in the newspaper that Poland had again been invaded by the Germans, but a part of her heart died: she had been raised under the partition, and forced to speak German in the schools, in the street. Did she know what happened to her village, that the people who lived there were shot, thrown in a pit, and covered with lime? They were not “her” people, they were Jews and Frances was raised Catholic, but were they not her people? She died in the same year the village of Zmegrud was destroyed.
Was it very different for her that she was saved? Living in a fine house in a neighborhood without sidewalks, with a country club, unable to drive, miles from the nearest public transportation, living on her son-in-law’s charity? No one spoke Polish anymore. The old ways had vanished. She hardly knew her grandchildren, they were a strange breed in this country, a foreign land; she spoke its language but she did not understand it.
Not one of them knew her. No one, except maybe Bella, had ever understood her. For them, for their friends, for the people she entertained, she was just an old woman, a servant, a foreigner in an old brown sweater with a hole in the sleeve. It had been long, and hard, and what had it given her after all? Tired. It was time to die.
IX
1
DIVORCE CAN STRIP YOU down to your essentials faster than any other loss. When someone you love dies or falls sick, there is always something besides yourself you can blame. But when you divorce, you have to blame yourself. You don’t need society to tell you you are a failure, as it assuredly did tell women who divorced during the fifties; you know you are a failure because after all, you wouldn’t have gotten married if you didn’t want to. So if you wanted the marriage to be a joy, and it wasn’t, and it grew so bad you had to end it, you failed at an enterprise you once wanted to succeed. And then when it’s over, you’re not dead, you go on living, and living alone.
I used to feel so sorry for my children because of the way their father treated them that I overlooked all kinds of bad behavior, and just hushed them up and cuddled them and told them they were good. And sometimes they weren’t so good; and—although I didn’t discover this until years later—they always thought they were bad when their father scolded them. So they came to think of me as either a fool or a liar, indifferent to their behavior. I used to think that if Brad and I could just separate, the children would be calmer, more contented: with just me around and no one to throw them into hysterical crying all the time, they would settle into the peace and love I could provide. Well, the opposite happened. They became moody and irritable. Billy spent hours in his room devising mazes and Arden became savage, storming in from school every afternoon and glaring at me as if I had somehow ruined her life; and then storming out again to play with one or another friend. Since she was stormy with her friends too, she often had no one to play with; and that was worst of all.
And I, who had been telling myself for years that I would paint if only Brad weren’t around, had to admit to myself that I was never going back to painting, that I was not an artist after all. The best I could be was a photographer. It took me a few late nights sitting up in the dark to admit that to myself, and the pangs I felt brought tears to my eyes. But maybe photography could be an art too, I thought, trying to cheer myself up. People were beginning to write about it as if it were.
The worst thing I had to admit was that Brad had been right about me. I had tried to remain an eternal child. Now that I had to pay for everything, and wasn’t given a weekly allowance anymore, I had to figure out amounts for rent and telephone and car insurance and electricity, and just starting to do that made me want to scream, all I could think of was my mother and her painstaking allotments of dollars and fifty-cent pieces to budgetary categories. Horrible! Not the way I wanted to live! But there I was. I never told Brad he’d been right, though. By the time our divorce was final, we were barely speaking.
Brad introduced the subject of divorce in May of 1958. He was almost thirty, I was twenty-eight. Arden was nine and a half and Billy had just had his eighth birthday. We’d been married just ten years. Brad had been staying out nights, and for several months he hadn’t attempted to make love to me, so of course I knew. We still appeared in public as a couple—we
went to dinner with friends, to movies and an occasional play, but our conversation was completely superficial. But that was no clue, since that was the only way Brad ever talked. He liked to talk about people’s new houses; or their new boats; or their taking a trip to Europe. He’d remark that this one said that restaurant was good, and we should try it. He’d suggest I buy myself something decent to wear, and toss me a fifty-dollar bill. I’d tell him about the things that went wrong in the house (more appliances, more trouble), or cute things the kids had done, or their marks on tests, or what one of my friends or her husband had done: but that was all. I was just waiting, biding my time. There was no way I was going to get out of this marriage if I wanted to: I’d have to wait until he did.
And so the night he came home and acted serious over dinner and asked me to sit in the living room with him afterward and have a drink, I made him wait until the kitchen was cleaned up and I’d taken a shower and washed my hair. Let him sweat, I thought. I wanted him to be eager and unwavering. Then I joined him, carrying a rye and ginger ale. I’d recently been forced—given our social life—to take up drinking, but I still wasn’t used to it.
He began by saying he’d been thinking about what I’d said the night soon after his great coup with the shopping mall, that we didn’t have much in common anymore. And that I’d seemed to suggest I didn’t care very much about him anymore. But I wasn’t about to let him take the offensive, so I interrupted:
“Cut the shit, Brad, you’re fucking around, right?”
He stopped, he stammered, he flushed. He said, “Jesus!” and got up and left the room, and I was afraid I’d gone too far. But I could hear the ice clinking in the kitchen and knew he was just pouring himself another drink and getting time to compose himself.
I felt like a hypocrite, though, cheap and small. Because if there was one thing I didn’t blame him for, it was fucking around. I’d have been fucking around myself if I had felt any desire whatever. I sat there sipping my disgusting watery drink, shaking my head at myself.