Hilda and Pearl (30 page)

But he couldn't remember. “Maybe you need to get out of the house,” he said.

I thought that was true, and I began to think about getting a job. I'd thought about it right away, right after Racket died, when I realized how little there was for me to do at home. But I'd buy the paper and forget to read the want ads, or I'd sit down to read them without a pencil, and be so tired—from nothing—that I couldn't stand up and go for a pencil to circle the promising ones. Then when I finally had some numbers to call, so much time had passed that I was sure those jobs had been filled.

Now I began to think about a job. They were easier to find than when I got the job at Bobbie's. I didn't want to go back there. Everyone would talk about Racket. I wanted to take a job with strangers, and not tell them I ever had a baby. The only way I could get better was to let events cover her up. I began to know that I wouldn't always feel as bad as I felt then. For a while I'd thought I'd feel the same way for my whole life. But when I thought about the mothers who had lost sons in Spain, I thought that maybe in ten years those women would feel a little better—and then it occurred to me that maybe
I'd
feel better in ten years, too.

I decided I wanted to work in a store. It would be simple. Somebody wants shoes, you give her shoes, she gives you money, you put it in the till. I could be nice to people without too much trouble. I thought about all this for a few days, and then I dressed up a little and took the subway into New York and went to the big department stores—Lord & Taylor's, Altman's, Saks. I got a job at Macy's, which pleased me because it was the biggest even though it wasn't the fanciest. I wanted to be on the first floor where the crowds swirled around, but after I'd filled out an application and taken an arithmetic test and been trained for two days, they put me in Misses' Sportswear. I liked the training. Someone had figured out everything and all I had to do was learn it. There was a procedure when a package was to be sent, a procedure for everything. I had to put the number of the department in a box, the date in another box. Each time I learned a new procedure, it made me feel better.

When I got out on the floor, it was harder than I expected. I had to stand all day, and the first day there, I wore holes in my shoes. I went home and soaked my feet. They were red and blistered. Nathan was shocked.

I made mistakes at work, and then tears would come to my eyes, as if I'd simply reached my limit in hard things before I got to that store. Making a mistake and having to get permission to void a sale and start over, I cried, but I didn't let the woman in charge see me. Sometimes I just had to count things—skirts on a rack, or blouses folded on a shelf. I liked that. I couldn't possibly do harm to anyone, counting skirts. After all, Pearl had left Racket outside that store, but I'd let Pearl push Racket's stroller.

I liked being able to help people. One customer didn't speak English. I don't know what language she was speaking, maybe Italian or Spanish. I kept smiling at her, and she smiled back and patted my arm. Finally I patted her arm. We got to be great friends. She went into the fitting room and I brought her skirts until she found one she liked. She could let me know what she liked and didn't like, and I smiled and even clapped my hands. We rejoiced together. She had a wedding ring on. I wondered whether she also had had a baby who died. It could be true. She was in her thirties, and there were no children with her. Not speaking each other's language, we didn't have to talk about these dead children. We were able to rub cloth between our fingers and pantomime how much we liked the cut of the skirts.

It was good to be bringing money home again. I'd thought money didn't matter, even though Nathan didn't make much, but with money we had possibilities. I used my employee discount to buy a new chair for the living room. It was the color of mustard, with a fringe on the bottom. When the chair was delivered, I looked at it, and thought that it had nothing to do with Racket, it was a place where she had never been. It made me know we had to move, and after a few months, I began looking for another apartment. I walked up and down the streets on Sundays, looking for signs in windows advertising apartments for rent. At last I found one, just a few blocks away from our old apartment, but far enough to have different neighbors who didn't know us. It was similar to our old apartment, a little bigger—but it felt different. You turned to the right when you walked in the front door, instead of to the left. Moving out, I felt as if I was leaving behind my daughter, who was buried under the floorboards. I felt worse than I had expected to feel. She had been dead for almost a year by then.

It was after Nathan's disillusionment with the Communists. I had found him slumped over, one day, listening to the radio. Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Nathan continued to go to meetings for a while after that, and some of his friends tried to reassure him. They said that Stalin knew what he was doing, that he should trust Stalin—but he couldn't. Once I found him crying. After a while he stopped going to meetings. Then we moved, and we were busy in the apartment. We had to buy new things. I shortened our old living room curtains and put them in the bedroom, and bought new drapes for the living room.

At work I was moved to the first floor and sold pocketbooks. I watched the crowd and marveled that I didn't know any of these people. Sometimes elegant women in suits and dark hats walked by, talking to their friends, looking like characters from a play about the upper classes. Once a line of schoolgirls in uniform marched past me, speaking French. I had no idea who they were or how they'd got there. It was easier to sell purses than sportswear—I didn't have to walk around so much. And it was one more move away from my old self, not just the self who still had a daughter, but even the newly bereaved self who cried when she made a mistake.

Now I chatted with customers and directed people who were lost. I could even direct people to the baby clothes department. It was good that there were still babies. Maybe someday I'd have another one. The first time someone asked me the way to baby clothes—not a mother or a grandmother but a man in a fedora—I watched myself to see if the question would break me, but I was all right.

I liked giving directions. I wanted to help people even more, and during the slow times, when I was supposed to look busy, rearranging and straightening the stock, I planned what I'd do if someone took sick and collapsed near my counter, how I'd rush around to catch her under the arms and lower her carefully to the floor. I didn't make friends, or at least, I didn't go beyond a certain point with the friends I did make. I liked my work friends. Sometimes I worked side by side with a woman for a long time and never learned her first name. I was Mrs. Levenson and she was Miss Bradley or whatever. I had friends with whom I'd never sat down, whom I'd never seen seated. We would talk, of course, when things were slow, but often about the store. The other women told me about the departments where they had worked, the advantages and drawbacks of each one.

This may seem cold but it was not cold. With each month that passed I felt stronger. Sometimes I let myself remember good times I'd had with Racket, rocking her or playing with her. When she was alive I hadn't thought of myself as a good mother, but now I could see that I'd been a good mother. I'd loved her. I never learned how to make her stop crying, but I was on her side. I got angry when she cried, but not at her—angry at the setup that made us strangers. I wondered what she would have been like if she'd lived. She had just been starting to speak a few words, but of course they didn't really sound like someone talking.

Nathan and I didn't talk about her. Losing her had brought him closer to Pearl and Mike, though—or at least closer to Simon. He was stiff and formal with Pearl, stiff and subdued with Mike, and I thought he was afraid, after Stalin had signed the pact with Hitler, that Mike's main subject from then on was going to be “I told you so.” And of course, being Mike, he couldn't help but give us some of that. “I don't suppose you're surprised?” he said.

“Yes, I'm surprised, Michael,” said Nathan.

“I could have told you.”

“You could have told me Stalin was going to sign an agreement with the Nazis? If Stalin is on the side of the Nazis, why did he go to all that trouble in Spain?”

“Beats me,” said Mike. “I never thought any of those guys had any brains.”

“Some people think it's a trick.”

“And you?”

“I'm not a tricky person, Michael.”

“Oh, yeah?”

This was in the lobby of the hospital, of all places. Mrs. Levenson was in the hospital. She'd always had a bad heart, and now it was worse. We had met at her bedside. Now we were leaving together.

“So where's Simon?” Nathan said, changing the subject. He needed Simon. I'd been afraid Simon would be too much of a reminder, but Simon was everybody's comfort. He was a quiet, bright little boy. He'd run to Nathan and beg to be picked up and swung in the air. Nathan didn't swing too hard or too high and that was what Simon liked.

“He won't let me do it,” Mike had said, the first time Nathan had played this way with Simon. “He cries when I do it.”

“You're rough with him,” said Pearl. “It scares him.”

“Who's rough? I'm not rough.”

Now Pearl offered us a ride home with them. We still didn't have a car. She suggested that we stop at their house to see Simon. He'd been left with a neighbor. All the way home, we talked about the coming war. We were all watching it come, those months. I couldn't remember ever thinking so much about faraway places, even though I was married to Nathan and we'd always talked about politics and current events. Now it was hard to remember that anything else mattered except Hitler being handed Czechoslovakia and marching into Poland. But at least it gave the four of us something to talk about that didn't make anybody run and hide. Pearl was the most upset, to my surprise, the most insistent that Roosevelt should bring our country into it.

“What if there's a draft?” I said. “What if Mike has to go?”

“Nathan could go, too,” she said.

“Well, yes, I suppose so.” Nathan was wearing glasses by now. He'd finally had his eyes checked, and it turned out his vision was very poor. “You are a menace, Mr. Levenson,” the eye doctor had said in a friendly way. “It's not safe to have you moving among us without glasses.” I didn't think the army would want somebody like that.

“I don't want Mike to have to go,” Pearl said now. “Don't think that. For God's sake. But Hitler's going to take over the world if we're not careful.” She had brought Simon home from the neighbor's and was taking off his coat. She seized him and kissed him as if Hitler were coming up the stairs. Simon ran to Nathan as soon as he was freed and squeezed between his knees. “Want up,” he said.

Nathan began to play with him. I saw Pearl watch them with a light in her eyes, and I wondered whether she still thought about Nathan, was even still in love with him, or whether it was Simon she was thinking about now. She was standing in the doorway, about to carry Simon's jacket to wherever she kept it, but standing still, she turned back, looking quite young and unaware of herself or of me looking at her. I was sitting in the chair where I'd hemmed my skirt after I beat her up, after Racket died. It seemed like a long time ago. Simon had been an infant, but babies grow into children quickly. Looking at Pearl, I felt something rather sweet and new come over me—despite all the fear and misery of worrying about war, which seemed to have replaced my grief, or to have gathered my sorrow into it. I forgave Pearl, that was what it was. I was embarrassed when the word came into my head. It didn't seem like something modern people did, forgiving. I wished I could say it, but I knew I wouldn't, certainly not in front of the men. I would have stood and touched her shoulder and said, “Pearl, I forgive you.” Of course the men would have thought I meant something else.

Whenever I saw Nathan's mother, for two years, she wailed. She never stopped rocking back and forth. She never quite stood up straight after the death of her granddaughter. She'd ask, “Why didn't God take me instead? Why not me?”

I'd get angry with her. “How should I know?” I'd say to her.

Then when she had gone, I'd cry and ask Nathan, “Why does she do that to me?”

“She doesn't mean to upset you.”

“Then why does she bring it up over and over? How should I know why God took the baby instead of her?”

“She doesn't really think you'll answer her.”

“I don't know what to say when she asks that.”

“I know.”

Of course the suggestion made me angry because I'd have been delighted to give her to God instead of my child. It wasn't as if God had suggested the exchange and I had refused. I couldn't agree with her out loud, though.

But it also angered me because it was too flattering to her. If such a thing were possible, if there was a God and He needed a certain number of us to keep up the troops in heaven, I knew that this grumpy old lady would never make a suitable substitute for my lively daughter. But I didn't believe in anything like that—I couldn't comfort myself with the picture of Racket wriggling for God in heaven.

“Leave me alone,” I shouted at her once. “It's harder for me than for you.”