Leo, awakening at nine o’clock, very late for him, is coming out of a familiar nightmare, his muscles tight all over, a familiar feeling, calves, arms, backs … Slowly, rhythmically, his father beats him with his cat o’ nine tails. Arnold, the cruel, demented musician, lashes Leo, his instrument, over and over on his bare buttocks, raising ugly, fierce welts. So many times this happened in life, and now in dreams, a performance to be replayed for all eternity.
Breathing heavily, inhaling the room’s stale air, opening his reluctant eyes, Leo throws his rumpled covers off and sits up in bed, rubbing the dark, curly hair on his bare chest, then smoothing his cool seersucker pajama bottoms. He allows himself a wide yawn—“hippo mouth”—Emma calls it when she sees him yawn like that, and the sound of the yawn makes him start to feel more in control, no longer a helpless child.
Out of the blue, he wonders how Cookie Coke would feel if she knew the truth of his childhood. Would she be moved to pity? Would all of her do-gooder, Church-going instincts be aroused, those instincts which, in anyone else, would nauseate him, but which, in Cookie, intrigue him? Since the last thing he wants from Cookie is pity, he vows never to tell her the truth of his childhood. Better to shroud his past in mystery. But why should what Cookie thinks matter? His relationship with her is light and easy, and will never develop into more. He takes his marriage and his responsibilities to his family seriously, and is proud of this fact.
He yawns again, another full-fledged hippo yawn. Every now and then, he allows himself a late morning like this, and his stockboys, Jorge and Pocho, open up the store for him. “We can handle it,” they tell Leo repeatedly and proudly, in their tough Puerto Rican street accents. Jorge, who’s 18, attends community college in the evenings, and has worked part-time at the store for the past two years. Pocho, his cousin, a few years older and a high school dropout, is sharp as a whip. “Leo,” Pocho says, “I’m proud to work for such a political hombre as yourself.” Leo believes that Pocho means what he says, and that he’s not just flattering the boss. Sometimes, in the back room of the store, while Pocho rips open boxes with a sharp box cutter, and then climbs up and down a ladder, stacking candy neatly and carefully on the shelves, Leo tells him about Karl Marx and the pitfalls of capitalism. “Viva Marxism,” Pocho says, smiling yet serious, taking a break and stuffing a Milky Way in his mouth. Once, Pocho said, “So, Leo, hombre, how can you, a Marxist, justify being the boss man?” “Because,” Leo said, helping Pocho open a particularly well-sealed box, glad that Pocho had asked, “in my heart, I remain the worker.” As he and Pocho together lined up Snickers Bars and Chunkies in neat rows, he conceded to himself that there was irony in his statement. And yet, despite the irony, it was The Truth With A Capital T.
Now, as Leo lingers in bed, muted light seeps through the slats of the venetian blinds in his bedroom. Tentatively, with eyes closed, he feels for the comfort of Annette beside him, but she’s already gone, undoubtedly in the kitchen preparing his breakfast. The girls are starting school today, he remembers, and Annette must have been up very early, getting them ready, feeding them, making sure they had their books and supplies.
Despite the distance that’s so often between himself and Annette, the distance he knows he creates with his temper and sarcasm, the distance that’s been exacerbated recently by his thoughts about Cookie, he loves Annette and appreciates, more than he could ever express, her steadfastness, endless hard work, and selflessness.
Coming to life, stretching and sitting up, he remembers that this is the morning he’s supposed to call Brenda and Evie, his sisters, who rent a small house together across the country, in Santa Monica, not far from the beach, where the sun hasn’t yet risen, and where, together, they’re raising Brenda’s son, who’s the same age as Emma.
For some reason, Brenda and Evie are proud that they never get a full night’s sleep. “Insomnia’s our middle name,” says Evie, the youngest, in her affectless voice, her Brooklyn accent still the strongest of the three of them.
It’s hard for Leo to believe that he’s now 40, Brenda 38, and Evie 36. His throat feels dry, and he leans heavily against the headboard of the bed, as he realizes that they’re all well into middle age, although his body is still lean and firm, attractive enough to kindle a light in Cookie Coke’s eyes. Back when they were kids, he had been especially proud of Evie, the way she belted out show tunes á la Ethel Merman, danced as gracefully as Ginger Rogers. Smart, too—that girl could discuss Tolstoy’s novels and Babel’s stories, not merely parroting critics, but offering her own quirky insights. “Babel,” she’d say, clearly proud of herself, grinning at Leo, and doing a little soft shoe, “said the most with the least.” Now, frail and dazed-looking, unmarried, Evie works as a file clerk in a real estate office, none of her promise realized.
Like him, his sisters had once believed in the universal good intrinsic to Communism. Now, they refuse to discuss what they call “political ideas” with Leo, so that he has no idea what they believe in and who they vote for.
Brenda, too, had appeared destined for a life better than the one she’s ended up with. Never outgoing and ebullient like Evie, she was pretty and shy. Leo was as protective of her back then as he believes he is of his daughters now. How happy Brenda had been, marrying a handsome young probation officer, a good, steady man with a good, steady job, who called her “Brennie,” and held her hand in public like a lovesick teen, right up until the day he left her alone with their two-month-old son, never to be heard from again, like a con-artist wraith who’d walked briefly among the living, getting away with whatever he could.
Together, in their middle age, Leo’s sisters live insular, unimaginative lives. He wonders for the first time if nightmares similar to his own are what keep them awake. Do they also dream of Arnold’s beatings with the whip-like cat o’ nine tails? Of Arnold’s heavily whiskered, unshaven face and cruel hands? Of their mother’s endless litanies about all the men who desired her, and how, if it weren’t for her three pitiful and ungrateful children—nebechl, she called each of them in Yiddish, harpe—she could leave their father?
Do they dream about the way their parents cursed each other in Yiddish and English both, like a long-running vaudeville act? “You shmuck,” his mother spat. “You shit,” his father responded.
Do they dream, as he sometimes does, about the time he and they ran away together from their parents and their Brooklyn tenement and slept in Prospect Park for two nights, beneath a black sky dotted with faint stars? They huddled together, cold and hungry, trying to stay warm, until, after being propositioned by a lunatic with six months worth of food stuck in his wild beard, they rose as one and ran home through the dark streets. Better to face the known enemy, they agreed, than the unknown.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he dials the phone on the nightstand. Brenda answers. Her voice is a zombie’s, disembodied and unengaged, as always, except when bragging about her son. Leo pictures her as she looks now in photographs, her once beautiful face swollen and red like a florid moon, her obese body draped in tent-like muu-muus.
All Leo knows about Brenda’s son, his nephew, is that he’s supposedly some kind of “genius,” attending junior high rather than elementary school, who eats only baby food, the strained peas and applesauce May and Emma gave up before they were walking. In public, Freddie won’t eat at all, since he doesn’t want to be seen eating baby food, yet nothing—not even the specter of public shame—will induce him to eat anything else. According to Brenda and Evie, this is because “Freddie is sensitive.” And maybe they’re right. Isn’t he himself the first to insist that being different from the mainstream is a good thing? Maybe the boy isn’t crazy. Maybe Freddie is an iconoclast, separate from the herd, by choice and birth.
Sometimes, right before he falls asleep, Leo pictures obese Brenda mashing Freddie’s pitiful food and dropping it from her mouth into his, like a bird. The image nauseates, and shames him—these people are his blood. Brenda, he thinks, must have inherited his parents’ craziness, although she’s not brutal, the way they were. He is, in fact, the brutal one, the one like his parents who uses fists to make a point and get his way. Could he be wrong though about Brenda and Evie not being brutal? Perhaps a cat o’nine tails is kept hidden in Brenda and Evie’s home, to keep the brilliant Freddie in line. Leo prides himself on the fact that he will never touch his girls with a cat o’ nine tails. He remembers too well the pain, and it’s a proud distinction he makes between himself and Arnold.
When Freddie was a toddler, Brenda and Evie came back east to visit Brenda’s husband’s parents. “I’ll show my son he at least has grandparents,” Brenda huffed, “if not a father.” With Freddie in tow, they stopped by the candy store. Leo remembers a gap-toothed, wiry child with copper-colored hair who scowled at his uncle and evinced no interest in the candies on the shelves. That alone had been disconcerting. Little kids who came into the store coveted, and lunged at, every single piece of candy they saw.
Brenda, chewing on the sugary gumdrop Leo had offered her, had looked vaguely around at Leo’s merchandise and said, “We’re too busy to take the bus over to the Projects. Say hello to Annette for us, and we’ll meet your girls next time.” But there never was a next time. And he never went to Santa Monica to visit them. The prospect, he admitted to himself, was too unappealing—frightening, even. Now over the phone, Brenda launches into a recitation of her woes, the same ones she recites to him every month when he calls: Her back aches, her feet swell, her sinuses clog. Her roof leaks, her landlord is a thief, her neighbors are stupid buttinskis.
Leo feels conflicted, as he does whenever he speaks with either of them. As children, they pricked their fingers and swore eternal allegiance to one another. Brenda and Evie alone bear witness to his childhood and he to theirs; they are bound together, connected in a way he will never be to his wife and children, despite his fierce love for them. In a crisis, they would do anything for him, and he for them. But is that true? Would they? He has met Freddie just once. They’ve never met his daughters. How is this familial love? How can he not acknowledge to himself how self-pitying and insular they’ve become? How can he not acknowledge that they never ask about him, or Annette, or the girls? Do they care whether he and his family live or die?
Yet, he, who ordinarily insists on being the center of attention, and who will do whatever it takes to be so—play the clown, the intellect, the wild-eyed radical, the ham, the provocateur—is reserved and measured with his sisters, never intruding. Isn’t that the least he can do for them?
His life, after all, has turned out so much better than theirs. His marriage is stable, he owns his own store, and although his daughters may not be so-called wunderkinds like Freddie, they damned well know how to behave in public, and they damned well know how to eat.
“Put Annette on,” Brenda says, as she usually does at some point, ready to move on to her next victim, to repeat her exact set of woes to Annette. “I want to talk to her.”
Annette, in the kitchen, is feeling relatively contented: relieved that the girls went off to their respective schools without any arguments erupting between them. They’d been sober-faced and serious about their morning ablutions, readying themselves for the big day. She savors the peace and quiet like the chocolate she loves best from Leo’s store, the most expensive candy he carries, a creamy, milk-chocolate bar imported from Britain, which only his most discerning customers—and even among those, only the ones with a little extra pocket money—can afford to buy. Usually, adults buy it for themselves, Leo tells her, not wanting to waste it on children who are happy enough with Milk Duds and Raisinettes. He frequently brings it home for her, and she recognizes this as a great gesture of love. She forcefully beats eggs for Leo’s breakfast in a large metal bowl while listening to sultry-voiced Patti Page on the radio, singing irresistibly about romance and hard times.
This is the morning of Leo’s monthly call to his sisters, and by now he’s on the phone with them, listening to them whine and kvetch. Careful to pour just a half-spoonful of milk into the eggs, the way he likes it, she resumes beating the mixture, and wishes she liked Brenda and Evie just a little bit. But she can’t help herself, she dislikes how self-centered and intolerant they’ve become, nothing like the delightful young girls she’d met back in Brooklyn. She remembers Evie best, in her floral-patterned blouse, her voice like music when she’d stopped Annette on the street and introduced herself. Remembering that day, Annette yearns for her own sister, her dead sister, her May, her best friend, gone so young, gone too many years. What would May be like today if she had lived? Kind, smart, beautiful. A socialist, like Annette. A schoolteacher or social worker, happily married, with children who would be loving cousins to her girls … .
Last month she’d told Leo that she didn’t want him to put her on the phone with Brenda and Evie any more. “What’s the point?” she asked. “They repeat themselves endlessly and never listen to a word I say.”
But here’s Leo, heading directly toward her in his pajama bottoms, yawning widely, scratching his bare chest, then regarding her with such a mischievous, impish smile she immediately knows he’s disregarding her wishes. “Pick up the foyer phone,” he says, arching his dark eyebrows.
Annette’s eyelids tremble with anger she doesn’t know how to express any other way. “No, please,” she says, wishing she didn’t have to endure the sound of her own pleading, “I told you … .”
“Brenda’s waiting,” Leo says, smiling even wider, eyes crinkling.
How he relishes her discomfort, her inability to stand up to him. Blinking back tears, her mood totally ruined, she wipes her hands on her faded flowered apron, then slowly moves toward the phone on the wall in the foyer. She hears Leo opening the refrigerator, undoubtedly looking for something to nosh on before breakfast, one of his irritating habits.
“Brenda, hello,” she says, frowning, forcing herself to sound cordial.
“Freddie’s I.Q,” Brenda announces, already growing strident, as though she expects Annette to protest, “is the highest for his age in the whole state of California.”
Annette says, “That’s wonderful,” making no attempt to sound sincere. She stops listening. She’s thinking instead about how betrayed she feels by Leo this morning. How especially betrayed, because last night they had made love for the first time in about a month. Twice recently he had wanted to, but once she had a migraine, and once was the evening he had exploded at Emma for accidentally knocking the glass of soda from his hand, and she simply hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch him. “I can’t,” she’d said that night, more insistent than she usually dares to be around Leo, “not after what just happened.”
“Bitch,” he’d called her and her heart froze. He had never before called her such a vile thing. Was this some new page that he’d turned, some marker that he no longer cared for her at all? No more had been said. He’d fallen asleep, and eventually, so had she.
But last night had been … What was the word?—lovely. No, more than that. Rapturous. Not a word she often associates with her sex life. More often, sex for her is uneventful at best, a painful chore, at worst, even though she continues to love Leo with all her heart, hotheaded and cruel though he sometimes can be. On nights when he falls asleep before she does, she luxuriates in watching him, the way his long eyelashes flutter and his full lips part slightly, the way he wheezes ever so slightly at first, before settling in to sleep. When she’s the first to awaken, she finds herself comforted by the sight of him, despite the fact that she never knows whether he’ll be in a decent mood when he wakes up.
But sex has always been a different story, even during the most romantic days of their marriage, before the children were born. She feels too vulnerable, too exposed, when making love. Woodenly, she goes through the motions, not comprehending why Leo grows so passionate, why he craves, time after time, being inside her, how he’s able to lose himself so completely in the act.
But last night she had felt herself relaxing, expanding. Her head had felt light and airy, her body, svelte and limber, not stiff and resistant. She wasn’t sure why, wasn’t sure what was different … maybe because he’d approached her more slowly than usual, his expression more dreamy than intense. For an instant, she feared that he was thinking of someone else, of another woman, Cookie Coke, perhaps, who so often becomes the repository of her jealous imaginings, despite the fact that she has absolutely no reason to think anything is going on between Cookie and Leo. Well, there is the fact that Leo mentions Cookie’s visits to the store more and more frequently. In truth, when Annette runs into Cookie in the Projects, she likes her seemingly irrepressible optimism, something she herself knows nothing about, and the way Cookie never fails to ask after Emma and May.
But then in bed last night, Leo had softly whispered her name and she knew it was only herself, no other woman, reflected in his eyes. She kissed him without waiting for him to kiss her first, held him tightly around the waist as he climbed on top of her. Her hips moved in tune with his, she heard herself sighing and murmuring, making sounds she barely recognized as coming from her own lips. And, when she awoke this morning from a dreamless sleep, she’d felt so close to him, and had decided to go all out for his breakfast, the whole shebang, a he-man-sized meal, perfect for the King of his Castle, eggs, bacon, toast spread with his precious guava jelly, oatmeal, and his favorite fruits, strawberries and blueberries … .
But now, grasping the phone tightly while continuing to blot out the sound of Brenda, who’s droning on about the pains in her legs, she changes her plan: no crisp bacon, no fresh strawberries, no cinnamon-laced oatmeal. Two eggs, a bit overdone, not soft and runny the way he likes them, and one slice of burnt toast—that will be all he gets. Let him complain, let him rant and rave, she doesn’t care. She’ll just play dumb, which is what he thinks she is, anyway, isn’t it? The woman who didn’t go to college, the woman who didn’t remember Ma Joad. Not that giving him a less-than-glorious breakfast is much of a victory, she knows. In fact, it’s no victory at all. But it’s the best she can do at the moment.