STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 3)

[Here's the conclusion of B.N.'s story, Still Life with Girl]

STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 3)

By the time the grandmother arrived the house was strewn with trash.  They had eaten raw rice from a box and pasta.  They drank maple syrup.  The grandmother screamed the mother’s name through the house—“Aliza, she yelled the stairs and down into the basement.  The mother was gone.  This was not the first scandal to hit the Village of Ramapo.  There had been the scandal about kosher chicken, one about meat and an entire dairy had been closed by the department of agriculture.  There were scandals that unraveled from 47th street all the way up the Turnpike and the Garden State.  There were the brothers that sold the same lot to five people and then decamped to Jerusalem.  This was different.

On the day the grandmother went to meet the principal she aimed to be prepared. She wore a sky blue dress with a belt that matched, a hat with bright red plastic cherries and a blue band. As support her girlhood friend Rebbitzin Gruner accompanied her, the one who supplied school clothes and shoes, who had some weight in the community.  And who also had if needed, a check book and her husband’s word that tuition would be paid.   She came fully made up, with a wicker handbag and dressed after all not to plead and not to offer an explanation, because she had none, but rather to attempt to assure the girl a place.  Seated in the inner office the first thing the principle said to the grandmother was that he knew for a fact that Mrs. Leiber was in Canada under the care of professionals, resting and making a fine progress and he had no reason to not expect her to return to her family soon. This was not just merely a piece of information passed from one to another in casual conversation, it was an opportunity, a chance, that in fact she had no chance of grasping onto. The grandmother understood this and felt that forgiveness was a wave that hit the shore and quickly went back out to sea.  Finaly with no tone of regret he said the truth was many people knew the story and he had other children to protect and donors to consider.

The mother would call sometimes and demand things—her books, a silver sugar bowl, a worn carpet. The grandmother cleaned the house and parsed through the children.  When she called the grandmother said that she did not know where the things were.  The boy sent to other relatives with money who could raise and educate a boy and the girl and baby stay with grandmother.  They moved out of the house into a small apartment closer to stores and a new school that would become one of many.  The grandmother made friends with the neighbors in the new neighborhood. She graciously accepted their cooked dishes the week the moved in, the invitations that followed and even the shared duties of watching children play.  The grandmother’s affiliation with Mrs. Gruner also carried freight along with curiosity. Her willingness to converse in Yiddish and to hem a dress here and pants there were well appreciated. The women admired the grandmother’s eye for decorating, for adding small details to a room, a vase, a golden and blue throw pillow.  They admired her upright stance, the fact that each step was measured. The truth was they still eyed the girl at a distance, unsure what she knew, what she had seen, how much she understood. And they after all had their own children to protect.

Once the grandmother took the girl to visit the mother in a house on a lake and there was a small row boat turned upside down next to a small dock.  They walked from the road where the taxi had left them off up a gravel and dirt path, the whole time the grandmother saying, “ How do you find such a place? Who could find such a place.” The girl sat on a lumpy torn couch with her feet dangling across from the mother in a captain’s chair that she recognized.  The mother did not offer anything to eat or drink and did not ask her about school.  The mother just sat and gave the girl a long hard look.  There was another woman there, older than the mother and she stood behind the mother’s chair. The grandmother stood with her back to them staring out a window that looked on to the lake—she said something about the view.  When they left the grandmother turned for an instant, just outside the turn and was about to say, “Please Aliza, please.” But before she could speak the mother looked at her and said “don’t start.” And closed the door.

Invariably they settled into a routine—a poorly mended rag doll family, flopping awkwardly through town.  Those times when the girl offered that she had not been invited to yet another one of her classmates parties, and had been crossed off every possible list real and imagined, and not counted in the tight social tally the grandmother would nod.  She did not offer to comfort or compensation by way of an alternative treat, never saying they would do something themselves that would be just as fun.  Except once the grandmother drew a long breath.  Just then girl wanted to say she hates this town, these people, having to be alone, but she knew if she said that it would sound to like her mother who they never mentioned and just the mere hint of startled the grandmother.  By this point she had matured enough to understand the pairings required in this life.  She could see the line of demarcation drawn, that outer distance, the tree line half way up the mountain, an off limits boundary where nothing could grow, where her mother stood, both hands blowing mock kisses.  The opportunity for return receded into the distance growing smaller and smaller until it was a faint speck. It was that breath taken from the air pocket.

Nobody could see the whole, some reactions expected, predictable, others a variable.   How far the tale traveled and how distorted it may have become and how crudely it may have been interpreted and internalized were random.  By that time the world had not changed and the grandmother bought her a new outfit for the holidays.  It was a white skirt with orange and brown stripes and a matching brown button-down shirt with a collar.  The entire neighborhood had the sukkas out decorated with plastic grapes and construction paper chains.  Across the street from their apartment was a boy’s Yeshiva.  A perfectly square building with a flat roof, a brick flash cube had the largest succah in the parking lot.  The girl never crossed the street to the school’s side except this once when two boys singled to her and shouted in Yiddish,  “ve koift min fish?”  She in fact knew where the fish market was and she crossed the street to point them in the direction.  The parking lot was empty, the school out for the holiday.  It seemed odd that boys would be sent to buy fish so late in the afternoon and in the middle of the vacation week.  These thoughts just skimmed across the surface of her mind. They both wore the identical uniform of black pants and white button shirts, with stiff black shoes. One had his shirttails out and bright red hair.   When she came closer she saw that one was loosening his belt and had his hand in the top of his white underwear and was pulling.  At first the girl though he was retarded, and she was about to tell him kindly but firmly that he can’t undress in public and to go home.  Before she could speak they pulled her behind the school. 

What he was holding had a slightly different complexion than the boy’s pale frecked face, darker, more the color of lips.  One of them circled around her and somehow maneuvered her up against a heavy metal door. When they pushed on her shoulders she slumped to the pavement, with her back against the door.  The redheaded boy’s pants were around his ankles and he landed on top of her and pushed her new sweater up to clear a space on her exposed stomach. Nisht z’vishen der baineh “Not between the legs” the other boy ordered and kept speaking in imperatives hurried speech that she could not understand, firing off commands.  The redheaded one held her arms back and then lunging back and forth against her exposed stomach until she heard a faint grunt and that sigh. On her stomach he left something wet and milky and she suddenly imagined it to be puss from a wound, a terrible disease, a sickness that was killing him and now her.  After, he stood up.  Looked straight at her, and said in perfect English. “Tell your mother.”  How could she explain it?  The skirt for the holiday was ruined from the dirt on the ground and all the leaves that had collected near the door were all over her, all over her.

B.N.
© 2010
 

If you'd like to read more poetry & fiction by B.N., you can search the label B.N. writing; you can also read an interview with her here.

STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 2)

[Here's Part 2 of B.N.'s story Still Life, with Girl]

STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 2)

The world separates as neatly as a sheet torn from the top of a tablet.  There are good people and bad people.  Nixon is bad, the mother says.  Vietnam is bad.  Martin Luther King was good, he was shot.  The FBI reads peoples’ mail, they have lists, the mother is sure she is on a list and her mail is read.  Whenever a piece of mail had the slightest crease the mother held it to the light, convinced that it had been opened, read, resealed by an entire team of government underlings hunched over an expansive dark wood conference table.  The people in this small community are bad, they are, she did not even hate to say it, little petty Jews.  They are not on a list.  The mother comes from a big city, several in fact, and studied at the Sorbonne, she speaks languages. Not Yiddish, that is not a language, more of a vulgarity.  Even though nothing in the house matches or is a set such that the neighbors at first asked when the furniture would be arriving she has silver flatware and trays and a sterling tea set and candlesticks as if to prove her lineage.  She is elegant but that is not important.  The mind is important.  The mother has no mother or father and no brothers or sisters. Only a mother-in-law that she calls my soon to be former mother-in-law.  She is waiting for peoples’ minds to open in new ways as her’s had.  Then she will assume her rightful place wearing the crimson mantle.  She reminds the girl of this often.  She reads and shakes her head.  They get the Village Voice and New York Times.  Stonewall was amazing. Then she calls a friend that comes over.  More friends come, they drive up from the city and hold poetry readings in the play- room.  Sometimes they bring food, strange gooey concoctions from Chinatown, bits of red floating in a brown sauce eaten with black lacquered chop sticks.  They sit on the counters in the kitchen with legs dangling or Indian style on the floor using cups for ash trays. They blast music and open windows   Like a memorized dialogue the girl hears about Jacques Brel and Lotta Lenya and living in Greenwich Village. 

“Do you see what I have going on here? “ the mother says to her friends. 

“You drove in, did you see them, it is like an ant hill, and they don’t even speak English, It is a nightmare…. Well I made one friend”  And with that the mother would flop into a chair and pick at the stuffing leaking from a tear in the upholstery.

 The mother savored hating the community, delicacies served up in Waterford bowls, relished (just a small bite) hating Chassidim, and without expanding on it—just plain hated the grandparents and the father and maybe the children.  Not the littlest baby named Freda, which means happy.  The mother refused to call the baby by her name and cooed to her in French.  The baby smiles and smiles a world of smiles, soap bubbles of smiles.

What sent it all careening out of control and over the cliff was the day at the dress store on Rt 59.   The mother went in and bought  Mrs. Leiber crinolines and petticoats. In fact after looking through the racks, she took the whole new Fall line, piled them on the counter told the lady at the cash register to have them delivered to Mrs. Leiber, as a gift. She then asked for a card to enclose.  The lady at the counter looked over the huge pile at the mother with an expression of confusion.  “These aren’t your size.” The woman said.  The girl recognized her as the mother of a classmate.  A comet streaking past the mother flashed her a fierce and haughty look. “I told you to pack them and deliver them, and if you must know they are a gift of love for my lover. So nosy, why are you so nosy”  It will be this look that caused the woman at the counter to recoil.  To turn instantly away from the grey cash register and, to reach for the phone the moment the door closed behind the mother.  The woman at the counter made three well-placed calls.  She calls the Rav in the shul off Rt. 45, she calls the principal of the school, who was the brother of the Rabbi of the shul off Rt 45, she calls her own husband to come and pick her up—right away. 

In the car the mother slaps the girl across the face, even though the girl has said nothing.  The mother drives the girl home and leaves her at the end of the driveway and then turns the car around.  The girl watches as the car snakes back down Viola Rd.  The men are out walking with the boys, the street begins to fill.  The girl runs into the house.  There is no mother, no father.  The babies are flushed from screaming and their hair is matted with sweat and dirt to their heads.  The girl takes a bag of frozen peas and sprinkles it into the cribs for the babies to pick up and eat.  By this point they were greedy and smelled. She remembers that Freda needs a bottle, that she props up for her by wedging it between the crib slats—like a water bottle in a gerbil cage.  They pull and strained against being lifted.  There are no diapers.  The mother, a rogue pigeon escaped from the cote, did not return. The girl ate raw meat because she has been warned never to go near the stove with her long hair.  The first few days the girl imagined that they were like a land-locked Robinson Crusoe, on an adventure. She felt safe in the house during the day, at night each tap of a branch against a window sent ribbons of fear through her.  After a few days, the days got bad too.

B.N.
© 2010
[Please check in tomorrow for the final installment!]
 

STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL (part 1)

[Over the next three days we'll be serializing B.N.'s story Still Life with Girl.  It's a very powerful piece of writing that I'm proud to have appear on this blog.]

STILL LIFE, WITH GIRL

It was as if they were in a submarine and the air lock had been breached.  When the water rushed in, each hoped for an air pocket to keep them alive.  Nothing more.   The truth, the family was different especially the mother, and as such they were approached with caution and viewed as suspect by their neighbors.  She wore her hair long uncovered and loose, a mane of the dark brown, that would always catch the slightest breeze and cause her to toss her head back and with one hand sweep the hair away from her face.  Other married woman wore their hair under a wig or covered by a scarf.  Such are the requirements of Orthodox women in communities and most women meet these requirements at least in part. 

Suburban conformity spread into the rural, a mediocre idea that grew.  The remains of an orchard that had sustained generations of landowning, hardworking Gentiles reduced to an apple tree in every other front yard.  The house a remnant—a moss green caricature slanted at the roof, leaned against underbrush and overgrown trees, an inlet of neglect.  Twice removed from the newer mirror image split-levels that flanked it on either side.

Inside, thumbtacked or taped to the walls were posters from distant farmer’s markets, Frank Stella exhibitions and quaint products, elixirs not sold for half a century, if ever. Throughout the house stacks of books created an obstacle course, so moving from room to room had to be done with care. The furniture mismatched and quirky, at the tables, chairs were unpredictable, some were whole, others are not, like lame animals allowed to remain out of kindness.  A slight shudder shifted all of them, like the seismic plates, under the crust of the earth, imperceptible at first, save a slight trembling of a glass of water at the bedside—a fault line that ran down the center of their lives.  It was more than the chafing between assimilated and unassimilated, more than a value placed on secular humanism and the possibility of world citizens. The mother asserted that she was educated and cultured and as if one thing followed from the other, showed little interest, in the color or length of curtains or in the price of eggs or in the latest trends in child rearing.  She told this to the girl often.  She would not interact with the neighbors and had turned down invitations so often that they stopped. 

In contrast, the other mothers watched children play in tight yards and talked to each other.  They shared ingredients and knew each others’ anguish at every toy stuffed inquisitively down the toilets.  They exchanged easy bright smiles.  Yet nothing humbled her, not the initial warmth at door, not the meals sent over when they first moved in, not the offers to share in a car pool.   Aliza Ahronson Berg would not go and join them. She had not lowered herself to that. She would not even give them a second glance when she backed the car (like a bat out of hell) out of the driveway getting out to get the mail dressed in a fringed brown leather jacket and peasant skirt with mauve ribbons tied in little bows and stitched around the hem line.

Long afternoons they sat inside, the mother read poetry and advised the girl to have a critical mind.  She repeated lines from poems—“ Do I dare to eat a peach” or “ I have measure my life in coffee spoons.”  Wisps of wordy smoke.  After she read she looked up and directly at the girl waiting for some mysterious response. A fixed gaze.  Her eyes implored the girl—say something, say something, you dimwit. 

Mrs. Failkoff said today that there was a giant hanging on Noach’s ark,” the girl offered because it was what she was thinking about, since it had just started to rain.

“And they pay her a salary for this?” the mother said.

There were multi-colored maps of the world hung on walls and she is told they are in the world. Lands conquered and claimed.  Independence fought for and won. Maps prove the world has changed, borders change when the world changes and then the maps change.  Taped to the fridge was a picture of the President under which it said “would you buy a used car from this man?”  Alongside it were pictures of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. 

Aliza Ahronson Berg dabbled in domestic trickery and meals were a whole other kettle of fish, sometimes a whole dinner of artichokes or chocolate sandwiches.  With an emotion stronger than any ordinary envy the girl wanted, longed for what she had seen others have on their plates for meals, she would ask for mixed canned or frozen vegetables, a confetti of color, or even meat with a sauce, or a soft white bread sandwich. Once the mother agreed after the girl hoarded the frozen vegetables in the back of the freezer.  She attended school with some of the other girls on the street.  A small worn to the bone school with dingy ceiling tiles that hung slack.  The girl often late or not there at all.  When she was there, most of the teachers overlooked her, one openly objected and one was nice and let her sit beside the big desk.  She watched the other girls the way she might have watched fish sliding behind glass in a aquarium.  The mother did not ask her about school and did not look up when she pushed the mimeograph worksheets under her nose, did not react as she repeated something the teacher said. 

The girl could walk home from school or take the bus.  Most days she walked as it eliminated the seat dilemma. The bus was a complex social situation, based on family, older siblings, cousins and what a father did.  She would just as well walk herself over the railroad tracks and past the store with takeout chickens turning on a spit in the window.  Even the newest stores still with Grand Opening Sale hung in the window already looked ratty.  When the long driveway snaked at the pine tree the girl would cut across the yard to the back kitchen door next to the bay window.  Always through the ice lace on the pane she could decipher the mood she was about to enter. Dirty dishes on the table meant nothing, a book open and out signaled the mother had gotten out of bed and moved through the house. 

It was March; there were still some patches of snow on the ground and the lawn pitted with small pools of melted brown broth.  Through the window she saw them both standing in front of the white refrigerator. She recognized Mrs. Leiber from the library. Her mother’s hand around Mrs. Leiber’s upper arm and the other plunged, splayed fingers into her hair, their lips touching and Mrs. Leiber’s head tilled back as if she was looking up but her eyes were closed.  Mrs. Leiber’s sheital, not just a wig but a stylized blond affair with outward turned curls on either side, was not on her head and she was dressed in the mother’s blue and white striped robe and stood barefoot.

When she opened the door from the entranceway she heard them a Morse code of sighs.  Although she could only intuit it on the most general level—each signaling the way the girl’s life would change. “ I’m so wet.” Mrs. Leiber said before she noticed the girl standing there.  These sighs, the sound that rose over the hum of the refrigerator would replay in her mind over and over and would precede ten thousand harsh stares in school, on the street, in stores.  These, notes of human music that would follow the girl escorted out of schools that had previously made a place for her. Each time she carried all the contents of her desk and her coat.  As a principle would drive her silently home.  Each time she knew she would never see that school or those teachers again. A scene repeated itself with some regularity.  That day Mrs. Leiber fled the kitchen and then reemerged fully dressed and sprinted out the back door. “She’ll be back.” The mother said as she closed the screen door after her.

She was the oldest, the other two were babies—one could walk with a tipsy gait, the other did not even sit up and only took a bottle.  They each mostly slept dressed only in an undershirt and diaper.  They never went and there was neither stroller or carriage.  They both always smell funny like rusty nails. The mother wanted to go to a protest, she said that they would write a lawyer’s number on their arm with a ball point in case the cops arrested them.

The mother’s mood lightened, she put combs in her hair like a Spanish dancer and said, pointing to a map, “The world is changing and we will be part of it.” She did a little dance around the dining room adjusting the volume to Joan Baez on the record player: "you got to walk that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yourself, ain’t nobody here can walk it for you, you got walk by yourself…” each chord loosening the knots in the coarse ropes of conventionality.

Men left a footprint on the moon and in the summer they closed Rt 17 and the New York State Throughway because of Woodstock, the counter culture just a few miles away, and about to knock on the door.  About to usher in a new value system.  The mother listened intently to the music like at the festival. Sad plaintive folk songs about love and loss, louder rebellious protest songs about war and death, and songs about taking, smoking or drinking enough of whatever that anything yelled at the top of the lungs sounded worthwhile.

Mrs.Leiber always walked home down Viola Rd, passed the twisted rows of apple trees on either side and crossed 306 to the intersection passing over the invisible boundary into the area where the women wear small pillbox hats over their sheital, where English was only spoken by outsiders.  The style of her dress was such that she never looked disheveled, smart European suits favor by the wealthy Chassidic women, crisp lapels on the jacket, a mid-calf skirt of the same material and her wig frozen into style.  She returned to her children, to the maid, to the cooked foods in the kitchen. Mrs. Leiber spoke German with her mother, sometimes French.  They both spoke many languages and lived in other countries. 
 
B.N.
© 2010
[Please check in tomorrow for the next installment!]