If dinner was the best thing in the day, dinner
time
was not. If Anastasia's mouth watered when she smelled the lamb chops or the meat loaf cooking, she always tensed up as she approached the dinner table. They ate in the kitchen, because they didn't have a dining room, but Mommy always set the table nicely, with the silver laid out properly and the napkins on the right side and the salt and pepper and butter on the edges of the table with the bowls of steaming food in the center. They all would help themselves, except when there was a roast and Daddy carved it. But Mommy always got funny just at the time for dinner, strange, almost annoyed. She always was putting the dinner on the table exactly as Daddy walked in the back door at 5:15. She had already called them: “Children! Dinner's ready! Wash your hands!” And sometimes Anastasia looked at her hands and they weren't dirty, so she didn't wash them, and when she entered the kitchen, Mommy would always say, in her annoyed-before-dinner voice, “Did you wash your hands?” and Anastasia would say “Yes,” even if it was a lie. But sometimes Mommy would call her over and look at her hands, turn them over in
her
hands, and once they were dirty. Anastasia saw it before Mommy did: there was black from her pencil all over one finger. And Mommy said,
“Anastasia, your hands are filthy! You couldn't have washed them! Go and wash them!”
Anastasia walked toward the kitchen sink, which was hard for her to reach, but Mommy insisted she go upstairs to the bathroom to do it.
She sounded really mad, so Anastasia ran back up to the bathroom, but she muttered “Why do I have to go upstairs,” and she felt Mommy was being mean and petty for no reason (she didn't know the word capricious), was acting mad at Anastasia just because she was mad at something. Still, angry as she was, her throat had a lump in it and she wanted to cry because Mommy talked to her that way. She didn't understand herself. Because she heard other children's mothers talking to them, and they yelled and screeched and called them names and were horrible, and other children didn't cry. Sometimes they turned around and muttered something nasty like, “Yeah, ya old man's mustache” (a phrase she did not comprehend, but knew to be insulting). And children talked about their parents in insulting ways, calling them “my old lady” and “my old man.” Anastasia would never describe her parents that way. But the other children didn't cry. Why did Anastasia always feel like crying? She couldn't understand it. The least thing made her teary. She was a baby. She knew it and she tried not to be, but she still was. She went back downstairs with pink scrubbed hands and a frown. But Mommy didn't even look at her hands, she was talking in her annoyed-before-dinner voice to Joy and then Daddy came in.
They always said “Hello, Daddy,” whenever he came home and sometimes he would say “Hello, Anastasia, hello, Joy,” in a friendly voice, and sometimes his voice wasn't friendly. But he was always nice to Mommy. He would come in and say “Hello, Belle,” in a special voice, as if he loved her. Then he would carry his hat to the cellar door, where he'd put up hooks, and put his hat on one hook and take off his coat and hang it on a hanger and put that on another hook. And then he'd walk over to Mommy as if he were dancing, as if he were sliding across the floor, and he'd put out his arms to embrace her and bend his face to kiss her. And Mommy would turn her face quickly so her cheek was toward him and he'd kiss her cheek and sometimes he'd try to hug her. Anastasia would turn her head when he did this because she couldn't stand it. Because he wanted to hug Mommy and she wouldn't let him; and Anastasia felt terrible for her father because she knew that it must feel bad if you wanted to kiss someone and they wouldn't kiss you back.
Then Mommy would say “Dinner is ready.” Mommy never asked if Daddy had washed his hands, but Daddy's hands were always clean. And then they could sit, and Mommy would pass the bowls around, helping Joy because Joy was just a baby. Mommy would cut up Joy's meat. Daddy used to cut up Anastasia's but now she was a big girl and could cut it herself. And each one would get some of everything, and then they would eat. It was very quiet. Sometimes Daddy would say something about the big boss, or Mommy would say “Anastasia got a hundred percent in an arithmetic test today,” and Daddy would turn to her and say “Good, Anastasia.” But that was all.
Once in a great while, Daddy would have steam coming out of him: once he told a story about niggers who had ripped out the stairs in a building to make a fire in their stove: he was appalled at that. Anastasia asked “What are niggers?” and Mommy glared at Daddy and said it was a bad word she wasn't to use and Anastasia said “Daddy said it,” and Mommy said grown-ups could say it but not children and all it meant was people with brown skins. But Anastasia was still horrified by people who would tear out steps to make a fire, and she wondered why people with brown skins would do that. She decided they must have been cold, and if they were, then maybe it was all right, but Daddy seemed to think it was the worst thing he had ever seen. But mostly he said nothing and Mommy said nothing. Anastasia could hear Daddy chewing. He chewed carefully, he chewed each mouthful forty times, the way they did at West Point. He said they should do that too, Anastasia and Joy. But Mommy didn't have to do it. But Anastasia set her teeth and wouldn't do it. Neither did Joy. Anastasia hated Daddy's chewing, it made her feel enraged, crazy, she wanted to scream at him, to pound on the table. But of course she didn't.
And then, if they had a roast, Daddy never wanted to let them have seconds and Mommy would always make him give it to them and he would carve a tiny piece and practically throw it on her plate and she could feel how he hated her. And she wanted to go to sleep, because she would feel very tired. Her dinner was gone, the best time of day was over, and she hated them, she hated Mommy who turned her cheek from Daddy and Daddy, who hated her and Joy, and yet she knew that Daddy would be happy if only Mommy would let him hug her and Mommy would be happy if Daddy made more money and she knew above all that the love her mother felt for her was there, in the dinner, in the food Mommy gave her, and somehow, although she loved the food, it wasn't enough.
A
H, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE
to make judgments. People do, of course: we make them all the time, running around in the world saying this is good and that is bad, and I suppose, believing what we say. But it's just so much nonsense. Even the shrinks, who, you'd imagine, would be beyond such things, insist on judgments. My friend Clara wants me to go to a shrink. She took me in hand one soggy sight and led me to the only door left for me, she said. She said I was depressed. That surprised me: Cheerful Nellie, depressed? Of course, I'd spent the entire evening in her apartment crying. I took the hint. She didn't want to listen to
that
anymore: who could blame her? And who knows, maybe she's right. But I don't want to go to a shrink and be urged to make judgments. Because if you stand somewhere and call it yourself, and judge others according to what they do or don't do to you or for you, then you can never be better than biased and personal and
small.
Yes,
small.
You can't get the “big picture,” you have no perspective wider than your personal trivialities. And I have spent years of my life trying to get beyond the personal and trivial, to find the universal.
When I stand here looking down the long corridor of my memory to that Depression kitchen, the old gas stove on legs, with a tiny sharp ledge running around it on which I never failed to hit my temple when I went to kiss Mommy goodnight; the old sinks, also on legs, with an enameled metal drainboard covering the deep tub; the cabinet with its glass doors behind which were all our dishes, and the two deep drawers that held flatware and utensils, and the double-doored cupboard beneath that held all our pots, and the door to the pantry, where the icebox was; when I see that wooden table and chairs painted aqua and decorated with floral decals; and the four people sitting on those chairs: she powdered and lipsticked with bobbed marcel-waved hair, in a fresh housedress, a little prim around the mouth, a little tentative around the eyes; he in his white shirt that he wore carefully so it would be clean for a second wearing, and his muscular body and full head of black hair, his innocent boy's face that rarely smiled; they, the children, thin and gawky, the one all legs, the other a halo of blond hair, restless and uncomfortable, being scolded for putting their elbows on the table: when I see them sitting there in silence, all I want to do is cry. Cry for them all. Cry, cry, cry: I could die crying and still not cry enough to let out all my grief, their grief. For to perceive justly leads only to sorrow.
When you look at them all sitting there, whom will you blame? Her, with her vacant dreams, her artistic aspirations, her energy and hope and her sheer blind trying, years of it, directionless, without help from anyone or anything, narrowed into this, this marcelled hair and powdered face, this neat table with its good food, this small scene, the clean ironed tablecloth, the string beans on which she saved two cents a pound, this sullen pale child in her shabby after-school clothes, this round-faced baby in whose longing face there is already a kind of despair: her entire universe shrunk to this, to providing this meal in this house to these people? Go ahead, blame her. Blame her for her coldness, for her turning away from desire, for her inability to hold, to embrace even the children of her own body: cold bitch. Yes, blame her if you dare, you son of a prick! Who lived out her childhood in emptiness that was the eye of a violent storm, who was never held, never mothered, never once wrapped in warm strong arms so that she felt safe.
Maybe you'd prefer to blame him, the silent expressionless man who hated his children. He was not a terrible father; he never raised his hand to them, not even his voice. He merely walked around in a grumbling fury that was like a storm always raging just beyond them, from which they shrank in fear and forgot even that they longed for him. Blame him, the bastard. A simple man whose emotions had been beaten out of him by a tyrant, who wanted love and closeness and cared about nothing else, and who hated his children because he imagined that the goddess he adored was giving them the affection she denied him. Who loved to use his body and his mind in the ways he could use it, who had highly developed senses and remained open to travel and discovery all his life, who was miraculously capable of happiness, but who narrowed, narrowed, narrowed over the years into a rigid timid automaton. Be careful where you walk, the world is full of banana peels, and no one will pay your hospital bill, and while you are on your back, you will lose your job and your house and of course if you lose those you will also lose your wifeâ¦.
Perhaps we should blame the children, who are already as limited as their parentsâthe one a sullen unforgiving furious timid prodigy, the other a sweet, too sweet smiling sickly dependent dependent dependent.
The narrowing of lives, the loss of dreams, are staple enough items in the cupboard of literature. But it is essential to remember what that shrinking feels like. Do you know? Can you imagine? Can you recall the day they first bound your feet? When they were still tiny? And afterward, how you could take only tottering little steps, and every step sent shocks of pain all the way up your leg? And how, certain days, the bones, which were being bent back in on themselves, cried out so fiercely that your mouth uttered it, and others turned to gaze on you with contempt, another ill-tempered female, just like the others. But it happens to all of us, female and male. Our bindings feel intolerable on certain days, when the weather is damp, when the bone is having a spurt of growth, when an image triggers the memory of whole feetâ¦.
I try to not-feel. I try to think. About them, us. But I am overwhelmed with feelingâwith hopelessness. It doesn't matter what you do or how you try: the same things happen, over and over and over and over. There is no escape.
T
HE SLOW QUIET YEARS
of the Depression flowed past; the children grew. Sometimes Belle feared they would not: Joy was often sick, and the only medication for most illnesses was merely aspirin. To these Belle added homemade chicken soup, hot tea with sugar and lemon, Jell-O, soft-boiled eggs, orange juice. Anastasia also came down with the usual childhood diseases, but she bounced back quickly. Joy did not, and lay in bed, eyes glazed with fever, round cheeks flushed, day upon day.
Added to her worry about Joy was her worry about paying the doctor's bills. Belle would tell Anastasia to watch over Joy and walk up to the corner near the gas station where there was a public telephone, and call kind Dr. MacVeaney who would drive all the way from Forest Hills to South Ozone Park and charge one dollar, which sometimes Belle did not have. Still, he would nod and smile at her understandingly, and say “That's all right, Mrs. Dabrowski. Next time.” But sometimes she did not have the money next time either. He never pressed her, he never even handed her a bill. She kept track of what she owed him, and always paid it, although it sometimes took her six months.
When she was four, Joy had a terrible ear infection that reminded Belle of her own mastoid infection, and made her fear for Joy's hearing. Dr. MacVeaney had to lance the infection without anesthetic; Belle stood watching him, Anastasia, also sick, watched from the next bed: the baby did not utter a sound, and when it was over, he stroked her face and she smiled radiantly at her torturer, who told her what a brave and good girl she was. Anastasia saw the expression around her mother's eyes, and knew Joy was very sick, but Mommy did not hug Joy. She went downstairs with the doctor. Later she brought up a dish of raspberry Jell-O, but Joy was asleep.
Aside from illness, there were few breaks in their routine. Every morning, Belle woke Anastasia for school, and when she had dressed and gone downstairs, there was always the fresh-squeezed orange juice, or half a grapefruit, and, in the winter, hot oatmeal or farina with cream; in the summer, corn flakes with milk and bananas. Anastasia hated all cereals. Sometimes Belle would soft-boil an egg for her, but she didn't like that either. She only liked pancakes, waffles, and French toast, but they had those only on weekends. She had to eat her breakfast, though, that was a rule. And drink a whole glass of milk, which she hated most of all. She would often persuade Belle to add a little hot coffee to her milk; then she could drink it. But after breakfast was the worst time, because then she had to take her cod-liver oil. Every morning, Mommy made her and Joy swallow a big tablespoon of it. She knew Mommy meant well, that it was good for her, but it tasted horrible. And then she would sit on the high stool while Mommy combed her hair, tears streaming down her face from the hurt of it, and then Mommy made long neat braids and fastened them with a rubber band and matching ribbons. Then Anastasia had a long walk to school. She hated to get up in the morning.