Her Mother's Daughter (33 page)

Soon, Wally moved his two suitcases of worldly possessions to a rooming house in Trenton, where the job he was working on then was located. In the coming years, he would move from one to another of such houses, as new plants needing wiring were erected in Newark and the Bronx. He followed his work and never had a home. Belle and Ed found a small apartment in Jamaica, near Jamaica Avenue with its noisy elevated trains, its trolleys, its many small stores, but off it, across the street from a park. They collected their few pieces of furniture from the attics and basements where it had been stored, and in August, just a few months before the new baby was to be born, they moved.

S
ILENCE. NO ONE SPOKE
. Even footsteps were inaudible as Belle moved zombielike through the small rooms. Anastasia sat splay-legged on the floor over a coloring book, her eyes alarmed, her face pale, her fat vanished overnight. She grew thinner and thinner and paler and paler, listening to the silence. Grandma had gone away, Eddie had gone away, Wally had gone away, Jean had gone away, everyone was gone except Mommy, and Mommy was silent.

Mommy did not act as if anything were wrong, she did not cry. She did not yell. She was just far away. Anastasia knew that if she hadn't been so sullen and defiant, so insistent and willful, they would not all have gone away and left her alone in this silent place. In the first months after the move, she would lie in bed unsleeping, willing with all her strength that things would go back to the way they had been so that she, Anastasia, could have another chance, could show that she appreciated them all. But no matter how hard she wished, or willed, it did not happen, and she sank more deeply into the lethargy that had followed the first shock.

It was also dark. The living room, kitchen, and tiny bath of the apartment faced the side courtyard of the building, and because they were on the first floor, Mommy had hung curtains and drapes over the windows, so people outside could not see in. Only the front room faced the street and the park and was brilliant with sunshine every morning. But it was so crowded with Mommy and Daddy's big bed, two chests, and Mommy's vanity and Anastasia's crib, that there was no place to sit in there, no clear spot of floor for her to color on, no chair for her to sit comfortably upon. She stayed in the living room and occupied herself with drawing and coloring. She had a whole stack of funny pads that Uncle Eddie had given her before he and Martha went away, long narrow white pads of thick paper with edges so sharp that she often cut her finger when she tore off a sheet. Daddy kept the pads and gave her one when she needed it. But she did not like her drawing very much. It wasn't the way it should be, the things she made were big and gross and ugly, when she wanted to make things delicate and subtle and balanced. So she would stop drawing after a while and lie down on the new rug Mommy had bought. It was red and had funny designs in it, nothing in it looked like anything real. Mommy was very proud of it, Anastasia knew, but she, Anastasia, thought the rug was ugly. Still, it fascinated her and she would lie on it for hours tracing with her tongue on the roof of her mouth the funny squiggles and shapes, things that were almost trees and flowers but were not trees and flowers, and she wondered why the people who had made it had not made it with trees and flowers that looked like themselves.

One thing she loved: the glass-paned double doors that separated the bedroom from the living room. She loved them because they let light stream through even when Joy was asleep in the bedroom and Mommy closed them; and because they were beautiful. She continued to love them long after the memory of their counterparts in the Manse Street house had faded. And one morning when she got up and walked into the kitchen, she saw that the chairs and table, which had been plain wood, were now a beautiful color.

“What color is it, Mommy?”

“Aqua,” Belle said.

Aqua, Anastasia breathed to herself. Aqua. A beautiful color, a beautiful word. She hummed the word to herself all day, through the silence.

The living room was almost empty. There was the big brown ugly piano that had stood in Manse Street, and a couch and two chairs and two standing lamps and the ugly rug. And over the couch, in a wide gilt frame, was a painting of a woman holding a baby, with another woman standing behind her and both of them looking at the child. But you could see not the baby's face, only the blanket it was wrapped in. The painting had a yellowish patina that Anastasia knew meant it was old, but it wasn't old, it wasn't what it pretended to be. Mommy loved the painting, and talked about her cousin Sokolowski the artist in awed hushed tones. Anastasia studied the painting for hours, tracing with her tongue on the roof of her mouth the shape of the mother's face, the dim shapes of furniture behind her, the window in the room she stood in, but she could not find anything beautiful in it. Anastasia decided she did not know what beauty was.

Every morning when she woke up and climbed down from her crib, she would pad into the kitchen where Mommy sat drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and Mommy would say “Good morning, Anastasia,” and get up and start to make oatmeal for her breakfast. But Anastasia hated oatmeal, so this did not make her happy. Then she would go into the living room and sit on the floor and color while Mommy cleaned up the apartment. Then, after lunch, Mommy would put on a fresh dress and put powder on her face and lipstick; and put Anastasia in a freshly ironed smocked cotton dress and shoes with little straps on them and white socks and her good coat and hat, and take Anastasia's hand as they crossed the street and entered the park. After a while there was Joy, and then Mommy did not take her hand anymore, but told her to hold on to the handle of the carriage. Anastasia resented this, and would bristle and say she didn't need to hold on, she was a big girl.

Anastasia hated the park. Mommy would sit on a bench, looking very elegant in her nice coat and the felt hat with the long feather pointing forward, and the other ladies would come too, with their children, and they would sit together, three or four of them, Mrs. Wallis, Mrs. Goldthorpe, Mrs. Thacker (who was old and had no children), and they would talk and tell the children to play. But Anastasia did not know how to play, and she would watch Lily Wallis and Eleanor Goldthorpe doing silly things and she would go off by herself and sprawl on the grass and make chains out of the little flowers of clover. She would slip them on her wrist as bracelets, but they always broke. She would gaze around her at the great vacant park, the trees, the grass, the side-walked paths, and it yawned at her hostile and empty. There were people in it; children's voices floated in the air like the sounds of animals, and people walked. But everyone seemed tired and stiff and old; or young and silly and noisy; and Anastasia could not find what she was supposed to do in a place like this.

But after that was over came the one time of day Anastasia loved. She and Mommy—and then Joy was there, too, in her carriage—would walk to Jamaica Avenue to do the marketing. First they went to the butcher shop, which always smelled of blood mixed with sawdust but had lots of meat with different colors—pale pink, almost white, deep red—and lots of baloney and liverwurst, which Anastasia loved, and sometimes Mommy bought some. Then they went to the vegetable store, which was even better—beautiful things piled up in pretty heaps, all shiny purple and red and pale green and orange and yellow. All shapes, the tomatoes and the little green squash, and the shiny pods of peas and lima beans, and wonderful satiny eggplants and apples and lemons. She knew she was not supposed to touch, but it was hard to keep her hands down. She just wanted to stroke the things to see what they felt like, but she couldn't do it, Mommy said, until they got home. But Mommy never bought most of those things—it was always peas or green beans or carrots or cabbage—Anastasia hated cabbage—and so she never got to feel the others. But she could look at them and smell them, and that was something.

Then came her favorite, Moe's Butter and Eggs. Moe kept his eggs heaped in a big basket with a handle, and when Mommy bought some, he lifted them one by one with great care and put them into a grey cardboard box. Anastasia loved the way the eggs looked, and the butter too, in huge wooden casks set on their side. When anyone ordered butter, Moe would take a big knife and stab it into one of the casks—the pale yellow or the darker yellow—and cut out a chunk, swish, just like that, and keeping it on the knife, lift it to the scale, where, with his other hand, he had placed a sheet of heavy waxed paper. And he would say, a little less, missus? or, a little more? but mostly the chunks were just what the ladies had said, a half pound. Anastasia was awed by Moe's skill.

The store smelled wonderful, of fresh butter and pumpernickel bread and crispy seeded rolls. But the most wonderful thing in the store, one of the most wonderful things in the world, Anastasia thought, was the beautiful deep pink fish that always sat on a marble block on Moe's counter. Sometimes a lady would order some—Anastasia never found out its name—and Moe would take a special knife, very long and thin, and slice, swiftly but carefully, ever so thin slices of this fish, and lay them gently on the heavy white paper. Anastasia pressed up against the glass to watch this. Once she asked Mommy if they could have some, and Mommy gave her an angry look. Outside the store, Mommy whispered that it was too expensive, so Anastasia never asked again. But she continued to wonder what the fish tasted like, so brilliant and vivid pink. Would it taste pink?

Sometimes, after Moe's, they would go to Anastasia's other favorite, Fiedler's Bakery. Fiedler's was very beautiful: it had a broad glass front window with its name in fancy old-fashioned gold lettering across it, and inside, on shelves of different levels, were trays and stemmed plates, all with pretty paper doilies on them, and on top of the doilies…! Well, everything! Linzer tortes, black-and-whites, Metropolitans with their tiny dollop of jelly inside the cream. And great big layer cakes creamed in white or tan or dark chocolate, and sometimes with pink or green decorations on them. But Mommy never bought layer cakes, she bought long stollens, which perturbed Anastasia because she could not understand why Fiedler's would sell or Mommy would buy a stolen cake. But stollens were boring, they just had sugar and nuts on them. Or Mommy would buy a crumb square, or a butter cake: Anastasia liked these better, and she always thought of Wally, who would ask Anastasia if she wanted a piece of crumb cake, and would cut a square for her, and then lift the whole rest of the cake onto his plate and look at her and laugh. She laughed too, because she knew it was a joke. Wally never ate the whole cake at once. And once in a great while, Mommy would ask Anastasia what she would like, and then she would panic, moving from one foot to another, incapable of deciding which treat she wanted most. She knew it did no good to point to the layer cakes: Mommy would not buy those. But a Metropolitan? Or a Linzer torte? Or a black-and-white? Or cupcakes? Or brownies? Oh, it was agony, and finally (she knew Mommy was impatient for her to choose) she would just say something, blurt it out, and Mommy would buy it and then she would forget the rest and walk home happily, looking forward to her dessert after dinner.

But once that part of the day was over, Anastasia's spirits flagged again. They would walk home in silence and Mommy would take off her hat and coat and hang them up and put on an apron and tell Anastasia to go play in the living room because the kitchen was small and she'd be in the way, and she would sit on the floor coloring or drawing and she could hear the tinkle of fork on metal, the scrape of the spoon in a pot and smell frying onions, and her mouth would water. But everything was so still. She would look up from the page and feel the dimness of the room, the silence of the house, into which only this smell entered, offering tantalizing promises of something different—a warm house with the lights turned on, a good dinner, talk and laughter, a grandma who took you on her lap, an uncle who pulled you over for a hug. But then, she had already forgotten these things, the warmth of bodily contact or a sweet voice saying
“
moja kochana
,”
people talking and laughing around her, they were buried in a realm so deep she would never again have access to them, and with them went all hope for life lived among folk, rather than isolated, silent, still, empty. She felt she lived alone in a great void which, if it were to contain anything, she herself would have to fill. She would have to make it up. She would lie back across the rug she hated—it smelled dusty, and it was rough against her skin—and daydream.

Then she would hear the front door open and Daddy's step in the hall, stopping at the closet to hang up his coat or put his hat on the shelf, and then down the hall and into the kitchen, and she would hear his sweet “Hello, Belle,” but Mommy would say nothing, and then she would turn on the radio and call Anastasia, saying dinner was ready, and Anastasia would get up and go in and say “Hello, Daddy,” and kiss his cheek the way he kissed Mommy's and get up on her chair at the aqua table and begin to trace with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, the designs Daddy had put on its edges,
decals,
Mommy called them, of peach-colored roses and little pink buds. And no matter how good the dinner had smelled, when she sat at the table Anastasia was not hungry, and would poke at it and pick around and ask to be excused, and would go back into the living room and lie on the awful rug and daydream some more until Mommy called her and asked if she didn't want some dessert. And if they had gone to Fiedler's that day, and her Metropolitan was waiting for her, she would go back and eat a piece of it that Mommy had cut for her. But if they hadn't, if the Metropolitan was left over from the day before, she didn't want it, it didn't taste good.

Lying on the floor, she could hear the radio, the Evening News with H. V. Kaltenborn, who had a funny high voice and made everything sound as if the world were ending that night. Then there were other programs that Mommy and Daddy listened to, and she could hear the program and the click of their forks and knives on their plates, and sometimes during dinner Mommy would ask Daddy how his day was, and he might say, “Fine, fine,” or he might tell her what the big boss said to him, and then they fell silent again and she could hear the chairs scraping on the linoleum and the plates being stacked in the sink and the radio, and water running as Daddy washed the dishes and Mommy opening the cabinet to put away those she had dried, and then the kitchen light would go off and they would come into the living room and Daddy would sit in the high-backed chair with the wooden arms, the uncomfortable one, and open his paper and Mommy would sit in the corner of the couch, and they turned the lights on, so the room was no longer so dark, but it was still silent as Daddy read and Mommy darned her stockings with a funny needle with a little hook in it, and then after a while Mommy would say it was bedtime, and Anastasia would go into the bedroom and undress in the dark, by the light that filtered through the glass-paned doors, and get into her crib and lie there listening.