Morning Is a Long Time Coming (7 page)

But for the first time all evening, Marshall became fascinated with me. (Or was his fascination strictly limited to what he was telling me?) He rubbed his hands together in anticipation for a moment before looking me straight in the eye. “Do you know what’s going to be the coming field of the future?”

I was frankly surprised and pleased that he was going to give credit to endeavors other than accounting and I wanted
to offer only a well-considered opinion. I thought about aeronautics. More and more people flying farther and faster.

I thought about medical research. And I thought about television. I’ve read that that newly born industry is on the very brink of conquering illiteracy and spreading culture (bravo Leonard Bernstein!) throughout the land.

Television. It ought to be television, but because Marshall Lubin didn’t seem to be the kind of man who could totally endorse a product that couldn’t be weighed, sniffed, or reduced to a formula, I looked elsewhere.

To chemicals. Yes, chemicals! I think I got it. Why, scientists are using drugs to cure cancer and depression. “I think that the coming field of the future,” I said with all the conviction of a person who’s really sure of his or her ground, “is going to be chemicals.”

“Chemicals?” Marshall was clearly taken by surprise. “Why did you say that?”

My God, why do I say anything? And why do I spend my whole life outsmarting myself? “I don’t know. I just thought—”

“Well, in my opinion,” he said, interrupting with all the finesse of the German hordes crossing the Maginot Line, “and in the opinion of people who know, it’s got to be accounting.”

“Accounting, now that I think about it,” I said too quickly to have thought about it. “I think I see your point.”

Marshall’s face became grave. It was obvious that he had something pretty important to tell me. Outside of being convinced that he wasn’t about to propose marriage, I hadn’t a clue as to what it might be.

He pointed a stubby finger toward me as though I were one of his disciples. “Accounting,” he said, pausing long enough to give the word a kind of solitary significance, “accounting is the field of the future. Consider the acknowledged fact that businesses are getting bigger, more complex. The bigger the business, the more they’re going to have to have accountants to protect their corporate structure.”

I hate what you do, Marshall. If only I knew you a little better, I’d probably hate you too. Because you have the colossal arrogance to assume that whatever you do, whatever you think, is the best thing worth doing, the best thing worth thinking. My God, Marshall, you must even give your bowel movements reverent consideration!

Anyway, I may be the world’s greatest authority on what it is you do. (And I’m not talking about your accounting either.) You see, I’ve lived for eighteen years under the same roof with Pearl get-yourself-into-every-equation Bergen. My mother is a lot like you, Marshall, in that she can’t conceive of being a part of any world whose dead-center isn’t directly focused upon her.

This isn’t even mother’s most recent example of making herself so shamelessly significant, but for me it’s a very memorable example. During the winter months, Alice Sheehan who for fifteen years worked part-time in our store took sick and her husband put her in Memphis’s Baptist Hospital where they diagnosed cancer of the liver.

After that my mother would invariably say as she left for one of her weekly excursions into Memphis, “I sure do wish I had time on this trip to visit poor Alice.”

Well, during the first week of April, mother still hadn’t
gotten around to visiting her so she sent her a one-pound box of Whitman’s Sampler, and during the second week of April, “poor Alice” died.

And ever since then I’ve seen my mother attempt to share top billing with Alice in her final drama. Not once or twice (but I’m pretty sure three times) I heard my mother talk on about that candy. Telling people in a voice laden with emotion, “I’m just so thrilled that I was able to make poor Alice happy in her lifetime.”

As I took just the perfect blend of vanilla ice cream and fudge sauce on my spoon, I anticipated the pleasure. So far, this had been the best part of the whole evening. I was finally getting something I wanted and I didn’t have to give a thing.

Marshall tapped my shoulder bone. “Want to dance?”

I looked at Marshall’s parfait glass. Only a dishrag could’ve cleaned it better. “Well ...” I said, automatically standing up as he pulled out my chair. “I just hope that I’m not too tipsy from the wine,” knowing somehow that it’s more socially acceptable to be clumsy with drink than it is to be clumsy without.

Ron Rainer was playing a slow number. A fox trot. Thank God. Thank Rainer. Marshall faced me with an almost heroic stoicism before taking my hand. It wasn’t until then that I realized it was wet with perspiration, but my knees were in even worse shape. I think my bones had begun disintegrating under the sheer weight of my one-hundred-and-eighteen-pound frame.

Yet with all of my suddenly developing symptomatology, I knew there was still one thing that I must never, never do.

So I glued my eyes on Marshall’s slightly oversized left ear, all the time telling myself that God would strike me down—POW!—if I should even once look down at my feet.

Then one, two, and three/four ... We were dancing! One, two, and three/four ... If there was something simplistic about the way that Marshall viewed accounting as world pivoting, there was something equally simplistic in the way he viewed dancing. One, two, and three/four ... But I guess I shouldn’t complain, it does make it that much easier to follow.

It was pretty near one o’clock when Marshall cut his car’s motor in front of my grandparents’ home. There was a light shining outside the front door and with no competing noises to interfere, it sounded as though every grasshopper in East Memphis were in concert.

Marshall dropped his arm around my bare shoulder and lugged me over to press out a damp, fleshy kiss. I felt slightly repelled. Wasn’t I supposed to feel the opposite? Something was wrong with me. He’s a man. I’m a woman. So aren’t I supposed to feel something ... something at least slightly passionate?

My hand yearned to vigorously scrub off his imprint, but instead I reached for the door handle. “Thanks for a lovely evening.”

This time he came down on my lips with such force that I felt my own teeth cut against the inside flesh of my mouth. “I really have to be going along,” I said, tasting blood, but experiencing concern that I was not feeling what Edna Louise and
Modern Romances
said I should be.

He didn’t seem to hear. With all his strength, he was
busily pulling me toward him. I hated that and I hated his breathing which was becoming heavier and more insistent. With my free hand I pressed down on the handle and the door swung open. “Well, Marshall,” I said, dragging myself out. “It sure has been a lovely evening.”

7

T
HE MORNING SMELLS
from my Grandmother’s Sunday kitchen drifted into the guest bedroom carrying with them a message of love and well-being. Impossible! Aromas, no matter how devious, don’t go wandering up a flight of stairs and down a long hall to pass through the closed door of a bedroom. And yet, there it was: beef fry frying (Edna Louise once called it Jewish bacon because it’s beef with bacon spices), real honest perked coffee, and the most glorious scent of them all, yeast. Yeast
raising bread or bialys or maybe even cheese and onion knishes. My favorite!

As I entered the kitchen, Grandpa looked up from his multisectioned
Commercial Appeal
which was spread out on the gray Formica-topped table in the breakfast nook. But it was Grandmother who spoke. “So tell us a little something about the rhapsodic dance. And about the
boychik
—uh ...”

“Marshall Lubin.”

“Yes, Marshall Lubin,” agreed Grandma so rapidly and with such emphasis that it was as though she wanted credit for finally coming up with the right name. “So did he like you?”

Right off, I didn’t exactly love her question. It smacked of: I’m selling something which Marshall may or may not decide to buy. “I didn’t ask him, Grandmother, but I wish ... I wish that you’d first please ask me if I liked him.” At least, if he’s going to show me up as a social klutz by not calling me again, then I’d like everybody to know that the chances are excellent that I’m not going to fall into an extended period of mourning. There’ll be no sitting
shiva
for you, Mr. Lubin.

“So ... well ...” Grandma was smiling expectantly, as though I were about to confide something that she very much wanted to hear. “Did you like him?”

“Oh ... he’s okay, I guess,” I said, glancing over at my grandfather. “But he doesn’t possess even an echo of Sammy Fried’s charm!”

Grandpa smiled as though fending off flattery while letting Grandma answer.

“For a husband there’s still time,” she said with such haste that I wondered if she didn’t really mean that there was almost
no time at all. I know she was only sixteen when she married, but that was a long time ago.

Anyway, I’m too sensitive. I know that. Not many other girls would be bothered by her question or think that they were being pushed into marriage. But I do believe that my own parents, for sure, would like to see me married as soon as possible. It’s as though I’m some kind of disease which can only be cured by legally passing it on to somebody else.

Somehow, my father and maybe my mother too, got this notion that I’m oversexed and that any moment now I’m going to present them with a bastard grandchild. I feel so ashamed for being the kind of person that makes them believe that. Why me? Me, of all people! And yet I wouldn’t even give them the satisfaction of telling them just how pure—speak about your Ivory soap—I am. Where, I’d really like to know, did my father get the idea that I was sexually voracious?

Because if anybody is always oogling up to the opposite sex, it’s him. Not me!

Another thing that I don’t begin to understand is why my mother continues to make routine (and altogether negative) evaluations regarding my attractiveness. Comments such as: “No wonder boys don’t like you. You don’t even bother to curl your hair.” Or her other lament, “Why can’t you put on a little charm for the boys?”

Well, my question is that since she’s so damned aware of how unpopular I am, wouldn’t you think she’d, at the very least, encourage my father to give me credit for purity? I mean being a sexual siren doesn’t quite jibe with being socially backward. Neither in Jenkinsville nor in Memphis in this the year of our Lord 1950.

Now Edna Louise, whom my father has called “a perfect lady,” may look like a cross between Snow White and Shirley Temple, but let me tell you she’s not. No matter how much her parents and even mine may need to believe that. Why, the boys don’t go around calling her “tasty tits” for nothing!

When I reached for my second cheese and onion knish, Grandma smiled as though I had bestowed upon her a great compliment. “They’re terrific,” I told her, just before biting into the most oniony part.

She filled my still half-filled cup with very hot coffee and asked, “You have something planned, something you want to do this afternoon?”

“There’s a concert at the auditorium at two. Yehudi Menuhin.”

Her senses seemed heightened. “Is the
boychik
taking you?”

Poor Grandmother is about to be disappointed. “Well, no ...”

“Oh, somebody else maybe? Somebody you met last night at the club?”

“Nobody’s taking me, Grandmother. I was planning to go alone.”

I watched her try to hide her disappointment by smiling at me as though now that she thinks about it, going alone is the only really sensible thing to do.

After the concert I walked back down Main Street toward the Fortas Furniture Store where I had carefully maneuvered Grandma’s Buick. I thought about the pleasure she gave me when she pressed her car keys into my palm. She had said
simply, “Enjoy.” The act itself seemed to represent those more important things that people never get around to saying—you’re grown, you’re trusted, you’re loved.

I didn’t mention it to her, but I did question the wisdom of letting an inexperienced driver behind the wheel of an unfamiliar car in a still unfamiliar city. Now, I don’t want to pick on her or her judgment. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with letting me borrow her expensive car, but my father—boy, would he ever have a different idea!

For twenty minutes or so, I followed Jackson Avenue east until I came to the old stone gates with the bronze marker, Hein Park. I made a right turn onto Cypress Drive, driving down the narrow, winding roads heavy with summer foliage, past houses of history and elegance.

At the freshly white Victorian with the yellow-and-white striped window awnings, I executed a skillful turn into the blue asphalt driveway. A place like this had to do more than merely keep a person sheltered. ’Cause inside a home like this, you’d be more than warm and dry, you’d be protected from all manner of things.

Inside the garage, I cut the ignition and sat staring at the wall. I thought about Uncle Ben, Uncle Irv, and my mother, especially Mother. And I got to wondering what was it really like for them growing up in this house. What bothers me is the thought that if my mother had gotten something from this house, from her parents, wouldn’t she be able—wouldn’t she just insist upon giving something back to me?

This was, after all, the place where my mother learned that her spectacular looks were worthy of the world’s homage. And maybe that’s when and why my grandparents became
confused and eventually couldn’t tell the difference between Pearl’s wants and Pearl’s needs. Is that why my mother knows so much more about taking than giving?

Just the same my grandparents didn’t mean harm. I know that! Maybe it was only that they tried too hard to protect their sons and daughter from those across-the-Atlantic Polish soldiers and all other evils either known or imagined by man.

And it’s these thoughts that keep burning at me, interfering at times with my feeling for my grandparents. Like last Friday—Thursday, it must have been. I was trying to figure out why their own children didn’t turn out all that well and while I was thinking, Grandmother said something to me and I answered her so sharply that right before my eyes, I saw my own grandmother shrink into an aged child.