At the same moment that Emma enters the churchyard, her mother, Annette, in the midst of putting away groceries, can’t stop going over in her head what Leo had said to her the night before. They’d all been sitting quietly together in the living room watching TV, nobody arguing for a change, Leo sitting comfortably on the sofa between the girls, May happily ignoring Emma and Emma happily ignoring May. Suddenly, Leo pointed to the TV. “That actress on the left,” he pointed at a zoftig, tired-looking female with her hair tied tightly in a grey bun, “looks like Brooklyn’s answer to Ma Joad.”
Automatically, without thinking, Annette said, “Ma Joad? Remind me who she is.” Before the words were fully out of her mouth, Annette wished she could sink into the fading, lima-bean-colored rug and disappear. Leo’s lips curled, reflecting his utter contempt for her. Too late, she remembered: Ma Joad, the Dust Bowl matriarch in The Grapes of Wrath. Leo would never forgive her for not remembering one of the major characters from what he considered “the greatest novel ever written.” She can’t help it—she has other things on her mind, things he can’t be “bothered” with, like the fact that her older daughter never seems to have any appetite, and her younger daughter grows saucier and sneakier every day.
“I wouldn’t have married you if I’d known you were so stupid and dull-witted,” Leo had said, his eyes bulging in utter disbelief at her ignorance.
Emma had audibly gasped and May placed her hand over her heart.
Annette flinched. He’d never before been quite this cruel to her in front of the girls. Or had he? In the past, he’d bragged, more than once, that he had “graduated college with honors, while your mother dropped out after freshman year.” He never adds that the reason she’d left school was to go to work in order to help her factory-worker mother pay the rent. And she never defends herself, because there’s no point. No one ever listens to a word she says about anything once Leo has center stage.
Never before last night, however, had Leo out-and-out called her “stupid” in front of the girls; she’d wanted to shove a sock in his mouth, she’d wanted to walk out the door and leave them all behind. Instead, she’d sat silently, hanging her head, not daring to meet her daughters’ eyes.
Annette unpacks a loaf of thinly sliced white bread from the grocery bag, and thinks more about her mother, Thelma Baum, who had never once thanked her for leaving college, had never acknowledged her sacrifice. Instead, Thelma said, “You owe me for all I’ve done for you,” something that Annette believed no mother should ever say to a child.
When Annette married Leo and they moved to the Bronx, Thelma had quickly vacated her two-bedroom apartment in a Brooklyn walkup, and moved near the Projects, into a shoebox, ground-floor studio, never asking if they minded, never asking if they wanted her so close. One day, she’d simply called Annette and announced her new address. Luckily, she hadn’t been able to get an apartment in the Projects, or she’d probably be living next door.
She visited almost every day, taking the bus, letting herself in with her own key. Without fail, the first thing she did, always, was to ask Annette for a glass of water, half in English and half in Yiddish: “Gefeln mir a gloz of water.” Then with a sort of plop and a belch, she made herself comfortable on the sofa, bending over to remove her dark lace-up shoes. “To shul Leo should go, to get some advice from a Rabbi,” she’d intone, sounding as pompous as Leo himself when he stood on his own soapbox against religion, starting right in on her own favorite subject: “Your husband doesn’t care about the Jewish people. He hates himself, he hates us. You’ll see, you’ll see … .”
Annette didn’t respond when her mother went on about Leo needing to become an “observant and self-respecting Jew” in order to be a better husband and father. How could she, when she herself was such a lousy Jew in her mother’s eyes? Thelma Baum had renounced her own Socialist and atheist past the week that Annette’s father had died of diabetes. To 16-year-old Annette, her mother, in her grief, appeared to be half out of her mind. Suddenly, she kept Kosher and observed Shabbos. Annette, already a fervent believer in the Socialist dream of “peoplehood,” a dream then embraced by so many Jewish Brooklyn youths who knew in their hearts that only pure socialism would create a world of freedom and dignity for all, was far too modern and secular to follow suit.
Annette opens the door to the cabinet above the kitchen sink and stands on tip-toes to put away a jar of guava jelly, Leo’s favorite. He expects Annette to spread a copious amount, but “not with lumps,” on his toast. Food is just one of the many things he’s demanding about. He has a favorite chair upon which no one else must sit. “It’s my throne,” he insists. “I am King of my castle.”
Definitely not the man she imagined him to be when they were first married, when she was so naïve, ignoring her friends who’d warned her away. Sarah Purl —her best friend back then, next to her sister, married now to a college professor in Tucson, barely in touch with Annette—had warned her away from Leo. “Everyone knows that his parents beat the kids. And each other. They’re completely meshugeh, all of them, even the sisters, deep down.”
Only Annette’s own younger sister, the late May, her older daughter’s beloved namesake, understood. “Leo’s irresistible,” she said, “a force of nature.” May had died of bone cancer shortly after Leo and Annette’s wedding. In complete agreement, for once, they’d named their firstborn after her.
Annette was 17, an Honors student in her senior year in high school, on the day she met Leo, who was the same age as she, and also a senior. Before then, she’d occasionally seen him out walking, sometimes with his buddies, all of whom dressed as he did, in tee shirts, dungarees with rolled up cuffs, and scuffed workboots. All of them looked vibrant, on the cusp of adulthood and great accomplishments, but Leo most of all.
A few times, she’d seen him out walking with his two beautiful sisters, to whom he seemed endearingly close. She knew what people said: “A brilliant, unstable boy. Not a good Jew. The family’s meshuge. Even the pretty sisters.” But the rumors only served to intrigue Annette more; she didn’t believe them. Leo might be rebellious, sure, but the kind of rebel who changes the world for the better, the kind of rebel the world needs.
He never appeared to notice Annette, not even the time she stopped in her tracks and stared directly at him as he walked by, so dazed was she by his dark, movie star-wavy hair, full lips, arched eyebrows, and intense blue eyes.
On this particular day, he was with his sisters, and was carrying a stack of thick, hardbound books. He must be extremely bright, she thought, not only handsome. Her shoulders stiffened as she prepared to walk past him, unnoticed as usual, when one of the sisters, the younger one, who was wearing a delicate, floral-patterned blouse, blocked her way. “You’re Annette Baum, right?” she said, in a friendly, lilting voice.
Annette nodded. Her forehead grew moist, and her tongue felt thick in her mouth. Self-consciously, she stared down at her sensible, navy-blue oxford shoes, which her mother had recently bought for her, complaining about the cost. Annette had hard-to-fit feet; the doctors said that her bones were weak and her arches flat. On top of that, she got headaches then, although they weren’t nearly as bad as they were now, when they knocked her out with tsunami intensity, leaving her paralyzed for days, a shell of a person, making her feel inadequate as a mother, and repulsive to her family.
“I’m Evie Rosen,” the sister introduced herself to Annette. “I met your sister, May, last week. She and I sat together at the movies. We laughed our heads off.” Evie Rosen stared quizzically at Annette, her eyes squinting up a bit.
“Yes, May loves movies,” Annette mumbled, aware that, for the first time, she had Leo’s attention. His sharp gaze remained on her. She searched her mind for something scintillating and witty to say about movies, or about her sister, or about anything at all, but she drew a total blank and whispered a quick goodbye, hurrying off as fast as her trembling feet in their bulky shoes allowed. She wished she could sink into the earth. She wanted to kick herself, to wail, fling herself down on the rubbish-strewn street. She had blown her big chance with Leo. He must think she was an inarticulate, vacuous idiot with no ideas about politics or literature or anything.
That night, she had the worst headache she’d had to date. Shooting pains not only inside her head, but in her arms, legs, lips, even her tongue. And nausea. And exhaustion that felled her as if she’d been hit by a car.
The next afternoon, hung over and woozy, as if she’d been on a bender, she heard a knock on her front door. Reluctantly, she opened the door a crack. It was Leo. She was stunned. She was relieved that, at least, the headache was gone. She was also relieved that her mother was out, as well as embarrassed by her shabby building, with its garbage on the staircases and everyone’s wet laundry hanging out in the back, directly across the street from a stable whose owners were notorious for neglecting their horses, and from which a terrible stench emanated. And then she was embarrassed for being embarrassed, because such an emotion violated her socialist principles, and, besides, he lived in the neighborhood, so how fancy could his home be?
In an unfamiliar high-pitched voice, she said, “Yes?” wishing she were wearing something more flattering than her oldest dress, a frumpy yellow cotton with too-short sleeves. She opened the door.
“Will you go out with me Saturday night?” He rubbed his hands on his dungareed thighs, sounding irresistibly cocky. “I’ll take you walking in the park,” he added, as though he were offering her the moon. He didn’t ask to come in, and she couldn’t gather the courage to do so herself.
She felt so warm she had to resist the impulse to fan herself. “I’m sorry,” she finally answered, her voice catching in her throat, “I have plans.” It was true: She had a date on Saturday, and breaking it at the last minute would be not only immature, but unethical. A woman of her word, she had promised Natie Hellman, from her Science class, that she’d accompany him to a teen dance at the neighborhood Social Hall.
Biting her lip, she waited for Leo’s response, hoping he would object so strenuously that she’d have no choice, no matter how unethical, to break the date with Natie. Instead, he turned wordlessly away and began galloping down the five flights of stairs leading to the lobby.
All day Saturday she was despondent, short of breath and on the verge of a headache, as she waited for Natie. Right on time, he arrived, wearing tan slacks and a pair of old shoes that she could tell he had spent a lot of time polishing to impress her. He was a sweet boy with a slight stutter, not a Socialist. “But I’m open-minded and quick to learn,” he assured her. “I’m not as backward as I may look.” Annette liked his honesty and modesty. There was nothing backward about him at all. Yet, she felt nothing for him compared to what she already felt for Leo, who made her quiver with desire, a state she’d read about in books but hadn’t believed could truly happen. At the end of the dance, Natie walked her home and tried to hold her hand, but Annette resisted.
To Annette’s amazement, and Natie’s confusion, Leo, in a clean white tee shirt and dungarees that looked freshly washed, was sitting on the stoop of her building waiting for her. “Annette,” he announced simply, tilting his head to look at her, “I’m here.” After that, she never dated anyone else.
Leo worked part time on weekends for Sam, the neighborhood butcher, with whom he shared left wing politics and staunch atheism, as well as a large appetite. Between customers, Leo and Sam devoured overflowing roast beef sandwiches and discussed Karl Marx. Leo’s salary was small, so his dates with Annette were modest affairs. Once in a while they went folk dancing, but most often they spent their time alone, browsing in bookstores, reading aloud to each other in hushed whispers. Leo’s voice inevitably grew loud with excitement, and other customers looked up in disapproval. He just smiled his crooked grin.
“I’m going to write a great novel,” Leo told Annette, “that will incite readers to action.”
“I know you’ll do it, Leo,” whispered Annette, stroking his arm, not believing her good fortune in love.
At political rallies, they held hands, not letting their political differences get in the way of their love. Although each was critical of capitalism and longed for a better world, he was a Communist, she a Socialist, groups that were sworn enemies. He believed in violent revolution; she was a devout pacifist. This made their love that much more exciting.
“In an ideal world,” he told Annette, “there’ll be one common language, and one skin color, deep, earthy brown.” In Esperanto, which he was studying, he said, Mi amas vih (I love you).
They held hands as they walked along the streets of Flatbush, waving hello to Sam, and Miltie, the shoemaker, whose handiwork frequently helped Annette’s “bad feet.” They passed by the small movie theater where Evie and May had sat together and laughed, and Annette said silent thanks to it.
On moonlit nights they strolled the undulating lawn and grassy hills of Prospect Park, stopping now and then to gaze into each other’s eyes. Leo loved to talk, and Annette loved to listen, absorbing each word as if it was medicine that would cure her of every sadness or dark thought or headache she’d ever had. They were a good match and they knew it.
Anne was thrilled that she and Leo shared a commitment to tikkun olam (bettering the world) in which housing, education, and health care were universal rights, even if she abhorred the Communist Party’s endorsement of violence as the means to achieve them, as well as its mindless idealization of the Soviet Union. “There are other ways,” she ventured one night as they walked through the park.
“Not so. The end justifies the means.” Leo considered Annette and her socialist cronies weak at worst, misguided at best. He squeezed her hand, and kissed her beneath a low-hanging moon, then recited a poem he’d recently written for her: A goddess lies beside me/enchantress to all/born of love and desire.
That was then, Annette reminds herself. This is now. Since then, disillusioned by Stalin, Leo has given up on the Soviet Union and is now a registered Democrat. “Stalin was a bastard,” he says, “but Communism is an ideal, a principle, that will outlast him and all his evil lackeys. I vote Democratic,” he adds, “because they’re better than the rest.”
Annette, on the other hand, has never stopped voting for the Socialist candidates, whom Leo despises. She’d made one exception, voting for the handsome, charismatic, Catholic JFK, whose promises and aura had been hard to resist. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, she wished she hadn’t. She blames him for the near extinction of the world.
Annette opens the refrigerator door and moves things aside to make room for Emma’s beloved Hostess cupcakes, but a tickle erupts suddenly in her throat and she begins to cough. Her hand jerks, knocking over a plastic container filled with the spaghetti-and-meatball dish she’d labored over all morning, for tonight’s supper. The linoleum floor is covered with bright red sauce, strands of spaghetti, and squashed fragments of chopped meat. Tears gather in her eyes, and she feels the pain in the back of her neck that’s so often a precursor to a migraine.
Clearing her throat and wiping tears from her eyes, she stands in front of the open refrigerator, staring at the food. She had mopped the cracking, chipped green-and-white (“vomit green,” May calls it) linoleum floor only yesterday.
Maybe she should just let the damned mess rot where it is. Why not? Instead of doing more back-breaking, mind-numbing housework, she should pay a visit to one of her friends, maybe Henrietta down the hall or Vera in the building next door, with whom she used to occasionally play mah jongg, although more and more, she has withdrawn from them. Yentas, Leo calls them, his lips curling in his unforgiving way.
It’s just become too difficult for her to keep up her end of things with these women, to pretend to be upbeat and cheery, to pretend that she, like they, is relatively content with her life, and that Doom and Gloom isn’t just around the corner. The Truth With A Capital T, as Leo would put it, is that she’s less and less interested in what they have to say about anything. Her world has grown increasingly narrow. Still, on some days, her loneliness is a heavy weight around her neck. But who said that everyone’s lives must contain friends? Some lives are meant to be insular, and hers is one of them.
Leo, of course, has his friends at the store, and that’s enough for him. The stockboys who work for him, and the customers with whom he dishes about politics and kibbitzes. He requires a constant audience, and he always finds one. And then there’s Cookie Coke. Is she more than just a friend? The highly sexual widow who pays weekly—or more—visits to Leo’s Candies, or so she gleans from conversations with Leo, who’s clearly titillated by Cookie’s status as a store regular. Occasionally, Annette runs into Cookie on the grounds of the Projects. “Your husband,” Cookie croons, her pearly teeth gleaming, “what a character!” Annette acknowledges to herself that she won’t be calling upon her neighbors today—not on the yentas with whom she once played mah jongg, and certainly not upon Cookie. There’s too much to be done around the house, even to think about playing hooky. Not that the work she does is valued. She cooks and cooks, catering to everyone’s finicky likes and dislikes: May, who wants her steaks so rare they bleed; Emma, who insists her morning glass of chocolate Bosco be strained ten times in front of her to ensure that no slivers of milk container-wax slip in. “Milk container slime,” Emma calls them. Leo, who demands pork chops nearly burnt, spaghetti and meatballs drenched in tomato sauce, vegetables tender yet crunchy.
And then May says, “This steak is dry!” and pushes the tender pink meat away. Recently, May’s been worse than ever about rejecting food. “It isn’t that I’m not hungry,” May insists, haughtily, her spine rigid and jaw tight. “I just don’t like what you cook.” It occurs to Annette that May might have some sort of stomach bug, although in every other way she seems fine—well, maybe she isn’t fine. Hasn’t there been something else about May lately, now that Annette thinks about it, something off-kilter she can’t quite put her finger on … But what? Something about the way she looks? As if her insides and outsides no loner mesh, as if her body has become a place of dissonance and discord.
No, that’s absurd, May is absolutely fine; rejecting food is just another one of her willful acts. But … maybe not. Should she ask Leo if he’s noticed anything different about May? No, of course not. He’s oblivious to change and nuance in others, just as he is to them in himself. Or, if not exactly oblivious, certainly unwilling to think about such things with any objectivity or calm.
And then there’s Emma, as difficult as May in her own way, spoiled and far too clever for her own good, with her huge appetite, especially for sweets, for chocolate cupcakes oozing vanilla cream, and doughy donuts, and multi-colored jelly beans—it’s a miracle she’s not chubby—shrieking, “I see wax!” after Annette has strained her Bosco the required ten times, so many times that Annette, herself, has developed an aversion to the wax, and imagines slimy-looking slivers where there are none.
And Leo, “the human garbage can,” as she sometimes thinks of him during meals, who shovels his food down at breakneck speed, making Annette doubt he has time to distinguish his precious guava jelly from tar. Leo never thanks or compliments her. Just once, he said, “This roast beef is soft,” and she assumed it was a compliment, but was never sure.
Then there’s the fact that Leo and Emma are both so sloppy, throwing their clothes and papers everywhere, expecting her to pick up after them. Leo’s dungarees and his favorite, comfortable, Cuban Guayabera shirts, with their highly stylized pockets and embroidery, thrown at the foot of their bed. And Emma, who, like a tornado at the height of its fury, tosses her blouses and skirts every which way, in the room she and May share. “You absolute, disgusting pig,” May shouts. “One day you will be punished!”
May, on the other hand, is too much of a neatnick: criticizing Annette for not lining up the sofa pillows exactly right, for not cleaning every single crumb from the toaster.
And now, standing in front of the open refrigerator—something Leo expressly forbids in his presence because “it wastes electricity”—barely noticing its blast of cold air, Annette fantasizes about leaving them all, running away from home like a rebellious teenager, making her youthful dreams come true, traveling around the country organizing non-unionized workers, working for the civil rights movement down south, helping people who would appreciate her, who would remember to say, “Thank you.”
But why delude herself? She should know better than to think her dreams will ever come true. Her youthful romance with leftist politics has led her here, to this lonely life in a lower-middle-income Bronx housing project, with no job other than housewifery, a handsome, brilliant, erratic husband, whose fidelity she’s begun to question, and two daughters whom she is certain she loves, but not at all certain she likes. And who may, or may not, feel the same way about her. No point in harboring escape fantasies. Definitely no point in pretending that Leo won’t ever humiliate her again.
On her hands and knees, she begins picking up the wet food from the linoleum kitchen floor and shoving it back into the plastic container. Rising, she walks over to the garbage can in the corner and quickly dumps the stuck-together food, sighing as she does so, knowing that now she’ll not only have to mop the floor all over again, but also, from scratch, cook up a whole new batch of spaghetti and meatballs for her family.