Chains Around the Grass (5 page)

Papa had grown old so quickly. Before she knew it, he too had left her forever. She had learned then not to oppose Saidie, but simply to retreat and retrench in the only territory where Saidie and Morris could not follow: her schoolwork.

Early on, Ruth had perceived Saidie’s uncharacteristic shyness as she looked over Ruth’s neat notebooks filled with mathematical equations and neatly printed English sentences; her awe at the sight of straight As on Ruth’s report cards, the “outstandings” filling the spaces left for teachers’ comments on conduct, work habits and deportment.

Brought up in the old country, Saidie and Morris had gone no further than the fifth grade in Polish grade schools, before being apprenticed to tradesmen in virtual bondage. But as Ruth grew older, she found her sister’s quiet respect take on a tinge of regret and finally a perverseness. School was all very well and good, she began to hear, but a trade, what of a trade? And then Morris would join in, evenings and weekends—the two of them singing in harmony that built to a resounding crescendo: “WHAT ABOUT MAKING A LIVING! ” and less loudly, because they knew it involved expenses on their part: “What about finding a husband?”

Ruth had wanted to go to on to City College. It was free, she had explained to them, but their voices had taken on a new stridency, a mockery with a cruel and self-serving edge: What does a girl need college for? Learn-a-trade-earn-a-living, learn-a-trade-earn-a-living, they drummed into her head until she felt it would explode. After all, hadn’t they been forced to? After all, didn’t they have children of their own to support? they reminded her with no intentional cruelty. She should feel a sense of responsibility. She should want, already, they prompted her when she was fifteen, to go out and be independent.

Her father long dead, with her friends lacking her grades and thus her legitimate aspirations, Ruth wearily dropped out of her academic program and took up commercial training. She became an excellent typist and stenographer.

After graduation, finding a good job had been easy. She became a secretary in the surgery department of a large hospital. The work had been challenging and the atmosphere—the sweet male homage by handsome young doctors to her lithe eighteen-year-old body, silky reddish hair and shy, dark eyes—thrilling. She learned all the medical terminology easily, and by the end of July, they gave her a raise and a pat (more like a caress) on the back.

Dr. Geddes.

She closed her eyes. Young, blonde, blue-eyed, college-spoken. And Gentile. It was summer and the days had been long and light filled, with plenty of time left over from lunch hours for walks in the park and little shopping trips to Macys and Gimbels. His hands had been white and delicate, like instruments, when he took hers gently.

She opened her eyes. Even in her wildest dreams, she couldn’t have imagined taking such a man home to meet Morris or Saidie. Fall came and the light faded earlier, and then it was winter. There had been no way to avoid it. She had to ask to be allowed to leave no later than 2 PM on Fridays in order to make it home in time for the Sabbath. Being Orthodox, it was forbidden for her to take the train home after sundown. It had been hard, embarrassing to ask, to explain. But the alternative—desecrating the holy day—was unthinkable. Unimaginable. With regret, they said they could not accommodate her “special religious needs.”

Her next job had been with two Orthodox businessmen whose foreheads constantly glistened with sweat, which they wiped away with the back of their hands. Sour, humorless middle-aged men, they wore hats even in the office. She worked in a windowless little room, not often dusted, whose metal desks and filing cabinets screeched like nails scraped across a blackboard when moved, chilling her with goosebumps. They gave her twenty minutes for lunch and had her work late twice a week and half-days Sunday in exchange for giving her time off on Fridays, even though the office closed at noon anyway. Each day, she typed up the invoices, rolling in paper after paper to exactly the same spot, hundreds of them exactly the same, every day. And each morning, she would find hundreds more waiting for her.

Miserable skinflints. They gave religious people a bad name, those two.

She lifted the album, meaning to put it away, and a picture floated down. What? Could it be? That many years ago already? She looked at the sweet, laughing face of the lovely young girl, the shimmering swathe of sunlight down her silky reddish-brown hair, and at the dashing young man beside her with his exuberant smile and gay straw hat.

She closed her eyes a moment, remembering that hat.

It had been the latest thing that summer, charming and stylish, even a little reckless. The kind of hat that lasted only for a season, fading in the sun, or unraveling at the edges. An impractical hat that no man in her family would have ever dreamed of spending his hardearned money on. Seeing it for the first time hanging on her sister’s coat rack by the door, her heart had done a little dance.

She had been working at her second job for four years, getting so thin and pale that even Saidie and Morris had finally noticed and began to hold worried family conferences. Placing her in the center of the room, she would answer their interrogations with dull patience. Yes. Fine. No. Nothing. Tired, that’s all. Late. Work tomorrow. Good night… Her litany. But then, coming home one evening, she had seen that hat.

The stranger was seated in the living room, next to Morris. She’d smoothed back her hair nervously and straightened her dress. He got up and extended his hand and she had hesitated—religious women didn’t touch men, even in courtesy. Finally, not to give offense, she took it shyly. Morris’ introduction filtered through in bits, like a bad telephone connection. A new man at the print shop. A neighbor. Joining us for dinner.

Throughout the hot, nervous meal, she’d felt alone with him. It was as if Morris, Saidie and her husband and their two children were soundless, invisible. His eyes laughed. His smile lit up the room. And he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She looked down into her food most of the time, staring at her mound of chopped liver, the bowl of yellow chicken soup and the bobbing, fat kneidlech. She was afraid to eat. Afraid the food couldn’t navigate the huge knot in her throat or the incredible pounding of her heart that filled her whole upper body so that there couldn’t possibly be room left over for a stomach.

Then, finally, it was afterward. He got up to leave. He stood by the door, well built and darkly handsome, twirling his straw hat between his fingers. Would she like to take a walk on the boardwalk in Coney Island with him on Sunday? She hesitated—and his smile, the shine on his face, began to fade. Amazed at her unknown power, she nodded a quiet yes.

Watching it all from the kitchen, Saidie and Morris had beamed with relief.

Ruth dusted the picture carefully. She could almost smell that day: the salt water, suntan lotion, cotton candy, boardwalk knishes. He won prizes for her in all the booths—big and little teddy bears, a kewpie doll, sunglasses. It seemed as if he didn’t know how to lose. His extravagance bowled her over, it was so unlike anything she’d ever experienced. And he was so confident; so sure he would win everything he had his heart set on. This time. Or the next time. And all it took was another penny, or nickel, or quarter or dollar…

“You should save your money, Dave,” she told him. “I already have more than I can carry.”

“Don’t worry, Ruthie,” he had smiled at her. “I’ll help you carry the rest.” And he had.

She smiled now, pushing the tormenting hair, once again, out of her eyes, scanning the still unopened boxes. For all she knew, the bears and dolls and plastic trophies were still in there, somewhere. All precious. All useless. Boxes, she thought. Full of things most of which we would never miss. How ironic it was that all the really important things in life, the things that really gave you lasting happiness, were never the things you struggled so hard to get. They were gifts: days without sickness or accidents or encounters with bad people. Days without misunderstandings or petty crimes—by you or against you, among the people you loved. And so what meaning did all these boxes have? And what was the point of accumulating even more things that would need still more boxes?

She was often philosophical. Her problem was that while the questions occurred to her easily and frequently, the answers never did. Of course, one needed things. But the vital things, the things that you couldn’t get on without were mostly too boring and inexpensive to warrant longing: sewing needles, potato mashers, underwear, safety pins. And the things you longed for, the big, important things that brought you romance and excitement, most of the time, didn’t last: pretty dresses got stained and faded, shiny new cars got dented and scratched, furniture buckled and sagged, and even a dream house, she imagined, must wind up feeling small and tacky after a few years, no matter how much you fixed it up.

How could longing and struggling for things that didn’t last bring a lasting happiness? She often pondered this. The only conclusion she had ever come to was that the seeking, the longing, the struggle and that first moment of attainment sometimes made you happy. For a while, at least. Perhaps that’s all there really was, she thought, those rare moments in-between all the rest. And the boxes and their contents were, in the final analysis just souvenirs really, reminders that you had once arrived and had a wonderful time. She kissed her fingertips, touching them to the old picture, thinking of Dave and regretting the anger of the morning.

Why, why, couldn’t he just let things be?

What business was it of his, anyway, if she had friends or didn’t have friends?

But he never let up. He had tried being funny and casual about it. He had tried cajoling, pleading, nagging. And now he had found a new tactic: sitting down by her side at breakfast, he had pushed away his cereal.

“I have no appetite. A small thing I ask you… What did I say—to murder somebody? To commit armed robbery? Ruth, I beg of you, go into the neighbors’ already. At least thank them for the help on moving day. Ruth…” and then he had done it, that final coup de grace which had left her without means of resistance. He had lowered his eyes and whispered: “I’m ashamed already to look them in the face. They’ll think we’re on a high horse. That we’re better than everybody else.”

That was the one argument that held any water for her, and that would never in a million years have occurred to her. That anyone might think that she, Ruth Markowitz, was a snob. That she held herself higher than someone—anyone—else.

It had been the same in Jersey. “Go into them. Make some friends,” Dave had exhorted her until she had gone against her own instincts. Of course, disaster had followed.

Oh, those awful women! Those black-hearted hypocrites in their white aprons and pearl-button sweaters! Why, that little Mikey had even asked Sara to bring the new TV outside “because my Mom says I can’t go into your Jew house.” Imagine!

But Dave never wanted to believe people could be like that. Mikey was just a little kid, Dave said, excusing him. Probably his mom told him not to bother us, not to come in and make noise. He didn’t see that it made a difference that his house was the only one for blocks with no berried wreath at Christmas, no multicolored lights, no crèche, no big bauble-laden, snowy pine tree visible in the living room. The only house around for blocks. He just refused to believe it. Couldn’t comprehend it. In a way, she felt contempt for his resolute, willful ignorance, or was it simply saintliness? What other name could you give such an elaborate effort to avoid seeing the sordid truth laid out before your eyes? Yet in the end, it had been Dave’s idea to have Jesse’s name legally changed from Markowitz to Marks, something she herself would never have considered. His explanation was ingenuous: “Life’s hard enough without some clerk giving you a hard time every time you fill out a form. They don’t even leave room for so many letters!”

It was the height of the war in Korea, all that stuff with the Rosenbergs. Being a Jew was bad enough. But a Jew with a Russian name on top of it…?! What he really meant, but couldn’t face, she understood, was simply that having the suffix “owitz” or “insky” trailing off the white forms, held a hard finger to your chest so that you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move up with the regular Americans, the ones who were going somewhere fast. Still, to chop up, deform your own father’s name, your family name? It was one of the few times she had ever felt her respect for him dwindle.

But if she was honest with herself (which at the moment she didn’t really want to be), her lack of friends in Jersey had had little to do with her religion. There had been other women, kinder ones, among her neighbors. She hadn’t gotten close to them either, finding no common ground. She hated housework, hated cooking. She didn’t go to beauty parlors and never read Good Housekeeping or Ladies Home Journal. She had never made popcorn balls or Jell-O with marshmallows. She didn’t know and didn’t want to know how to get shirts whiter, toilet train kids faster, keep linoleum shining and furniture dust free. She had no interest in the PTA, and of course, so much of her neighbors’ lives were taken up with church activities. But Ruth was never one to fight against life. She was resigned, disenfranchised, tool-less to affect it in any way. She accepted this without bitterness. But this had not stopped her from seeing clearly that this was not the life she wanted; nor the kind of people she desired as friends.

What did she want? She never gave it much thought anymore. Once it had been her father’s encircling arms blocking out Saidie and Morris; then it had been good grades, clean notebooks and hours to spend in the cool dark haven of the public library. As a young wife, she had thought she had everything: a man so handsome, so considerate, and the fulsome, overflowing joy of lying in his arms in their shared bed! She had never even imagined the roadmap to so strange and blissful a country. It had taken many years for her to even peek down and notice the mud the journey had left on her heels.

Then, all at once, unhappiness had just swooped down, vulture-like, from nowhere, carrying off bits and pieces. For one thing, she finally realized to her utter surprise, chagrin and shame, she didn’t like being home with small children.