Hilda and Pearl (31 page)

I thought she'd be angry with me forever, but she only shouted, “Of course harder for you. Who said not harder for you? God forbid I should think not harder for you.”

Then suddenly one day she died of heart failure. Mostly we were surprised. She wasn't particularly old and although she had been in the hospital twice, she didn't act sick. She would clutch her chest when she came upstairs, and we wouldn't have handed her a heavy package to hold, but we assumed she'd go on that way for a long time. When she died I thought that at least she would no longer come into my living room and wail, and I wondered whether she had died of a broken heart.

God didn't give Racket back even though He had now decided He could use Mrs. Levenson after all. He must have wanted them both. “So send her back!” I found myself shouting at my dead mother-in-law one afternoon when I was alone in the apartment, my arms in the dishpan full of suds.

“I should have screamed with her,” I said to Pearl one day.

“About Racket?”

“Yes. Remember how she used to scream?”

“Of course. I don't think it made her feel any better.”

“I don't know,” I said. It occurred to me now that I might have asked Mrs. Levenson whether she wanted me to answer her question about God. “What do you mean, answer?” she'd have said. “How should I know from answer?”

“I'm sorry she died,” I said to Pearl.

“Me, too,” she said. “I think I mind more than Mike does.”

“Nathan minds,” I said.

“Maybe Mike does too,” said Pearl. “It's hard to know what Mike really thinks.” We were in the playground where we'd sometimes met before. It was a Sunday, and I'd gone over to her house with a knitting pattern she had wanted to borrow. It was the summer of 1940 and Racket had been dead for two and a half years. Simon was three. When I'd reached Pearl's house, she was about to take him to the playground, and she asked, a little hesitantly, if I wanted to go along. Mike stood by sullenly and watched us talk. I didn't know if something particular was bothering him or not.

“Mike is like a boy,” I said now, while we watched Simon play. I pictured Mike zipping up his jacket and tucking his face down, putting his hands in his pockets the way boys do. Even when he wore a topcoat and a hat instead of a cap he kept his head down, looking at the ground and whistling. “He whistles,” I said.

“Yes,” Pearl said. “Boys whistle.”

“There are things he doesn't seem to talk about,” I went on. I wondered if he ever talked about Pearl and Nathan. Well, we didn't; why should he? But I thought he thought about it. He spoke to Simon as if it was in his mind.

I suppose Pearl thought it would still be painful for me to go to the playground, but it wasn't. I'm not made like that. Or everything was painful. Once, the summer after Racket died, I'd gone and sat in that same playground, the unpaved one with the trees, the one we'd liked. It was late in the evening, almost dark, and no one was there. I cried quite a bit there, but I cried quite a bit everywhere that year.

As we talked, Pearl stood next to the slide, and whenever Simon reached the top and started down, she would go over and crouch, waiting to catch him. He hadn't yet learned to put his feet down when he reached the bottom, and he was afraid to slide down unless she was there. When we left, Mike had said, “Don't baby him, Pearlie.”

When I said there were things Mike didn't talk about, Pearl didn't answer because she had gone over to the bottom of the slide once again. She was wearing a dark green skirt and when she crouched, it touched the ground. She laughed at Simon, who was working up his courage at the top of the slide. “Should I come now, Mommy? Should I come now?” he called.

“Now would be fine, darling.”

“Would
now
be fine, too? How about
this
now?”

“This now would be fine, too.”

At last he came down, and she caught him and kissed him. She put him down and shook the gravel off her skirt.

“Mike thinks like someone in a room without doors or windows,” she said. “He just goes around and around.”

“So he never changes his mind?”

“Never,” said Pearl. “He never changes at all. No, that's not true. He does change. He wears out a path on the floor and then things change. It's different.”

“What's different?”

“Well, the floor has a slope,” she said. We both laughed.

I looked up at the leafy trees. It was the time of summer when the leaves seem widest. I've always wondered whether they get narrower later. I looked up to see whether the trees were going to help me or whether I was going to be sorry for what I was about to say.

“Has he forgiven you for your—for that unpleasant experience with—”

“No, Hilda,” said Pearl. “It was very pleasant. It wasn't unpleasant until later. Sorry.”

So she could talk about it more easily than I. Of all things. It silenced me for a minute. Simon had wandered off, watching a bird. Then I said, “I wanted to know whether Mike is still angry with you.”

“In a way he'll always be angry,” she said, after a pause. “But he's worn a place on the floor. Anger's different when it's a habit.”

“He'll never understand it,” I said.

“Understand it?” Pearl's voice was tremulous.

“The way I do, I guess,” I said.

We had moved to a bench and Pearl had taken out her knitting, but now it lay untouched in her lap. “So how do you understand it, Hilda?” she said, not looking at me.

I thought about it. “It was selfish,” I said.

“Yes.”

“On the part of both of you.”

“Yes.”

“But selfishness isn't a capital crime,” I said. I turned on the bench to talk to Pearl, though I was also watching the trees behind her. The leaves moved a little, up and down. “I don't want to spend my whole life listening to people apologizing to me,” I said. “It's insulting.”

“How is it insulting?” She stared at me. “I don't understand why it's insulting.”

“I don't either,” I said. Then I added, “It keeps you and me from knowing each other.”

“Catch me, Mommy,” Simon called now. “Catch me.'”

“I've thought about that,” she said to me, ignoring him, “but I thought it was mostly Racket.”

“Well, Racket, too,” I said. “Of course.”

“How could you like me?” she said.

“And if I hate you?” I said. “How am I better off?”

She shrugged and picked up her needles. “I don't know how you're better off, Hildie. Heaven knows I'm not better off if you hate me.”

“Catch me!” called Simon again, running past us. This time she stood up and ran over to where he was waiting and picked him up. Then she wiped his nose with a handkerchief she took from her skirt pocket. Then she decided it was time to go home for lunch, and we should pick up Simon's toys. On the way home she talked about other things.

After a while we began to see each other all the time again. We'd have each other's family to our houses for supper. The men were quiet, but they didn't protest. Or we'd go shopping. Pearl bought a new winter coat that fall, and I went along to watch Simon in the stores while she tried coats on. Pearl was always hungry. I didn't remember that from before. She was always suggesting that we stop at Schrafft's or Child's. We had pancakes at Child's when we went shopping, or we went to the Automat for baked macaroni and cheese or tongue sandwiches. We usually went shopping on Saturdays. I'd been in the store at work all week, but I didn't mind. We found things to laugh at, somehow, on those days.

Simon loved to put nickels in the machines at the Automat and be picked up to open the doors and take the food out. I remember how intently he worked the machines while I grasped his firm waist. Even though Racket had lived such a short time and had been dead for so long, it was always a surprise to me that Simon didn't kick and struggle when I held him.

One day in the Automat we met Pearl's old friend Ruby. She was married now, she told us. She still worked at Bobbie's. Billy had mostly recovered from his injuries. “He walks stiffly,” she said. “He's afraid it will keep him out of the army.”

“He wants to go again?”

“He still wants to fight Hitler. Billy thinks if he doesn't get Hitler, nobody will.”

“So he thinks we'll be at war soon?” I said.

“We should have been at war long ago,” said Ruby.

She had lost Pearl's address and we all wrote down addresses. Then a week or so later I came home from work and heard voices in the living room, and it was Billy talking to Nathan. I was glad to see him. He'd grown up a lot. He had been like a child when we met him. I remembered him shyly standing in Pearl and Mike's kitchen, trying to deal with so many strangers. Now he was more confident, but still quiet. He was telling Nathan how sorry he was about the death of Nathan's mother. I wondered whether they had already talked about Racket. Of course they had, I thought. I walked into the room to say hello and to see whether Nathan had offered him anything to eat, and Billy stood up and came toward me. He lurched when he walked. He pumped my hand for a long time. Then he took my shoulders gently between his fingers and leaned forward to kiss my cheek, aiming the kiss very carefully. “Hilda,” he said.

“It's good to see you,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” he said. “You're the one who's had troubles.”

I went to bring a fruit bowl. He was talking eagerly to Nathan about his experiences, about the friendliness of people in Spain. Old women had kissed him and cried over him.

“The winter was rainy, yes?” said Nathan.

“Rain. Then heat. Oh, boy.”

I left them and went to start supper. After Billy left, Nathan followed me into the kitchen and stood watching me quietly. “Do you know what he said, Hilda?” he asked me. “He said Ruby wrote him about Rachel, and he dreamed about her for weeks.”

“There in Spain?”

“Yes. He said when he has a daughter he's calling her Rachel. He said he fell in love with her when he saw her.”

“I remember that he was nice to her,” I said.

“I didn't even remember. I just remember him talking about getting killed, with that light in his eyes.”

I was tidying up while the meat loaf cooked. They'd eaten oranges, and I gathered the peels and threw them away. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink. I was washing them, knowing that Nathan was standing behind me. Then he came closer and put his hands on my shoulders just the way Billy had, not wrapping the whole palm over the shoulder but taking my shoulders between his thumbs and forefingers, the way one would pick up a dress. When Billy did it, it made me feel as if he thought I might break, as if the loss of my daughter had shriveled me until I was brittle. Nathan's fingers felt different, more definite. I turned off the water and he pulled me around and looked down into my face. Then he kissed me hard on the lips.

Nathan had kissed me many times in the years since he had gone to bed with Pearl and since Racket had died—two events I thought of together now—but if he kissed me in the kitchen it was to comfort me because I was crying. He kissed me in bed when he made love to me, but his lovemaking had been perfunctory, almost embarrassed, as if someone behind him were saying, “Now kiss her.”

But that evening in the kitchen he kissed me like my young lover, and groped at my clothes as though he had never seen me without them. I was wearing a blouse and skirt and I laughed at him as he unbuttoned the blouse slowly, from the top down. “Now what's got into you?” I said.

“I don't know. It's a good time, isn't it?”

“Don't you want to have supper?”

“When will it be ready?”

The meat loaf had half an hour to bake.

“That'll do, I guess,” said Nathan. I laughed and turned down the oven.

We went into the bedroom, me with my blouse still hanging open. I hadn't had time to make the bed in the morning and it was still unmade. Nathan undressed quickly and I took off my clothes, too, sitting down to unroll my stockings.

“I love to watch you do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Roll your stockings down. You do it with the bottoms of your fingers, not the tips.”

“I don't want to start a run.”

“You're a kind person, Hilda,” he said, a little sentimentally.

“Kind to my stockings?”

It was pleasant to take them off and to wiggle out of my girdle. Nathan hadn't watched me get undressed for a long time. He'd seen me, of course, night after night, but he hadn't seemed to be watching me. Maybe he had been, all along, if he looked forward to seeing me take off my stockings. I felt free and as if my belly was a pleasant thing, for once.

I got into bed. He was hard—he had been erect the whole time I was undressing. I wanted to give him everything, all the warm circles of excitement gathering in my body. My breasts seemed to reach toward him when he stroked them.