So Jude Silverman was a Yiddish Chicken Little? What did it matter, when she had Rob Jones, the man who proposed to keep the sky, however gray, up above? He had promised her this years ago, in a flat in Brooklyn, when Jude poised her beat-up feet on the inside of the window ledge, clutched the drab, mud-colored curtains, and threatened to throw her 100-pound body splat into the street.
“Now Jude,” Rob said. “Don’t do that.”
“I was born to die,” Jude said.
“So do it later, when I’m not looking. Come on down now, and we’ll get married.”
“Well.” Jude looked dubious. “Okay. All right.”
The marriage license they applied for an hour later seemed to appease Jude’s suicidal urge, although it whetted a desire for a hot, salty pretzel. Only a pretzel delivered from the wrinkled hands of a vendor in Central Park would do. Jude wound her hair into a knot and kissed Rob, long and lovingly, on the subway into the city. “Trains really bring out something from my cultural unconscious!” she shouted above the roar.
“Could you speak a little louder? I don’t think they heard you over on Staten Island.”
Jude pouted. “You never let me feel persecuted. You never let me feel guilty.”
An hour later she was weeping over the polar bear—big, white, and shaggy—that paced its cage, like a madman, in Central Park. “He’s been here as long as I can remember,” she said. “He’s so hot. He’s so lonely. He probably has bad breath. He probably hates himself.” Jude gave the polar bear a long, significant glance of farewell that signaled her identification with him was complete. She sniffed. “You got a Kleenex? This pretzel is so lousy, it’s making me cry. I’m warning you. You’d better not marry me. The littlest thing sets me off.”
As if Rob, the moment he met her, hadn’t figured that out. It was what initially attracted him. He’d been a UPI photographer in Southeast Asia before his weak stomach had gotten the best of him and he returned to New York to shoot not battlefields and revolutions and riots, but movie stars and models and other such innocuous subjects. He was disappointed in his lack of heroics until the day he went to the theater to photograph Jude and broke down her explosive temper as expertly as a soldier might dismantle a grenade. “Load your guns,” Jude had ordered him. “And don’t make me look ugly. Make me look like Pavlova, you know? Or Isadora Duncan.”
“I’m a photographer, not a plastic surgeon.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, be yourself.”
Jude’s forehead wrinkled. “But I don’t know who I am.”
Rob bit his lip in exasperation. “You can be a tightrope walker or a plumber. You can be a duck or an elephant, for all I care.”
“Are you trying to call me schizophrenic?”
“I’m trying to get you to pose!” Rob shouted. “Would you pose, please, so I can get out of here and eat my dinner?”
Jude backed her body up to the wall as if preparing to be executed. “Okay,” she said penitently. “I’ll cut the ishkabibble. Fire away.”
She was a principal with the Future/Dance/Theater, a modern troupe committed to catering to the so-called politically aware. The week before, Rob had seen her perform her most famous solo role, “Hiroshima,” a dance consisting of nothing more than an excruciatingly slow meltdown to the stage, so that at the end of seven minutes Jude lay in a heap on the floor, symbolizing the Japanese dead. The dance was a New York hit. It was supposed to be a social statement, but Rob thought it was so much sixties kitsch. The naiveté of it offended him. “What do dancers know about politics?” he challenged Jude at that photo session.
“All we need to know: Hitler killed the Jews. Hey, you want to take me out to dinner? Feel free to say no if you’re married or engaged or gay.”
In the restaurant, when she wasn’t stealing drags off Rob’s cigarette, stuffing her mouth with grilled steak, or washing her food down with beer, she complained. “It’s horrible being a dancer,” she said. “You can’t smoke. You can’t drink. You can’t eat. You can’t have tits or hips, you can’t have a headache or a stomachache or a backache, you can’t have a social life or a family or a boyfriend—”
“Why can’t you have a boyfriend?”
“You should see the fruitcakes I meet.” She stared at him. “You’re too old not to be married.”
“So my mother tells me.”
“Are you sure you’re not gay?”
Rob leaned across the candlelit table, gently covered Jude’s hand with his hands, and looked her meaningfully in the eye. He hoped to sound tender and eloquent and romantic. “I love women,” he said.
“Great,” Jude answered. “Let’s get laid. But first let me finish off these croutons.” She dug into her salad with her fork. “I hate when they’re drowning in dressing. I feel personally responsible. I need to rescue them, every survivor. I can’t leave a single one behind.”
Rob was amused by her zeal. Unlike his previous subjects in New York, Jude had passion, however misguided. It didn’t strike him she was disturbed until she admitted it herself, back at his place. “I’m a kook,” she warned. “A real nut. No analyst would touch me with a ten-foot pole.”
“I’m not an analyst.”
Jude Silverman pounced on him. Purring, she pressed her pelvis against his camera. “Mmm, then, photographer. Give me an F-stop I’ll never forget. Fire away.”
So she was famous, among the avant-garde. Her thin, birdlike face had been reproduced in all the Village rags professing allegiance to the arts, and eventually appeared in Vogue, Elle, and the Times art page. Her silhouette could be seen on Future/ Dance/Theater posters tacked up on plywood construction barriers all over the city. But Jude’s photographic claim to fame had come early, at age seventeen, when she had appeared on the cover of a national magazine in a performance that had absolutely nothing to do with dance. The year was 1967; the place was a Jerusalem street. Jude knelt on the cobblestones, surrounded by glass, spattered by blood. To the left of her lay the lower half of a man’s body, and to the right (the viewer would be safe to presume) lay the upper half of the same man. In her arms Jude cradled the man’s amputated arm, which (if the viewer examined it closely) bore the tiny blue tattoo of numbers that branded inmates of concentration camps.
The picture, taken by a rival of Rob’s before Rob had ever been aware of Jude’s existence, had enjoyed considerable fame. It had been reproduced in numerous newspapers, books, and magazines. Rob had always been jealous of that picture; it struck him as the perfect shot every photographer dreamed of getting. Yet something about it struck him as bogus. Such symbolic pathos seemed too good to be true; it struck so directly to the gut it seemed forced, maybe even fake.
“This pic was famous,” Jude showed it to Rob. “It won all sorts of those Nobel Prize things.”
“Pulitzer Prize,” Rob corrected her, irritated.
Jude shrugged. She took the magazine from Rob and squinted at the picture. “That’s my uncle,” she said, dispassionately, pointing, “here and there. That’s my uncle’s arm I’m holding.” Jude jabbed her finger at the picture with such vehemence that Rob was sure she was gearing up to issue a philosophical statement on the nature of peace and war, or the inhumanity of man to man. Instead, she traced her finger along the curve of her spine in the picture. “Look at that posture,” she said. “Flawless.”
Such a crazy girl she was, with such crazy family portraits. Oh, the crazy things she ate (boiled spinach on a bed of cottage cheese, hard-boiled eggs sunk in a pool of borscht, ice cream speckled with pastrami), the crazy things she wore (mirrored headbands and ostrich feathers, pink leotards and see-through black chiffon skirts), and the eccentric things she said (to a waiter: “Will this entree give me bad breath?” To a policeman who politely requested that she step around a barricade: “This is a free country, you fucking Nazi!”). She was paranoid and jealous. She was possessive of Rob’s flesh, kneading his body in bed, sighing as she confessed she wished she could steal some of his weight. Their lovemaking was crushing, and the wind-down consisted of Jude’s own crazy brand of post-coitum triste. She lay still for a few minutes and then hopped out of bed. Standing in front of the full-length mirror, she moaned, “Oh. Oh. She felt so good a moment ago, but now Jude Silverman has a terminal case of the uglies. Her arms are too thin, aren’t they? And all those ribs. You could serve her up at a barbecue pit. You could use her as an anatomical skeleton. And her neck—Swan Lake it ain’t. Nice legs, but those knees, those knees! And what about the lack of hips? Sexually unattractive, isn’t it? Tell her the truth. Give it to Jude Silverman straight.”
Button a lip, save a ship. Rob was not keen on playing Jude’s self-destructive game, on telling her what she professed to want to know, that she looked like a skinny, shell-shocked apparition from a Ben Shahn painting, that she looked nervous and apprehensive, like those anorexic chihuahuas bejeweled women in mink stoles walked on the city streets. He loved her precisely because she made such a wonderful postwar portrait. He didn’t mind the oddities of her body. What she didn’t criticize about herself became his only peeve.
Jude Silverman had disgusting feet. Her big toes flattened like hammerhead sharks, and the rest of her toes, perhaps terrified of the killer big ones, cramped into tight curls and shied away. Corns spotted the knuckles, blisters broke out on her ankles, and callouses toughened the entire underside of her feet. Something about that pair suggested the abused child, the defeated soldier who had marched too long without boots. Rob refused to accompany Jude into a shoe store, afraid of what the salesmen thought. She wore nine and a half narrow, a forlorn, forsaken size. She wore, when she wasn’t dancing, an anklet strung with tiny brass bells that sadly, continuously, tinkled. As she padded about the apartment Rob got the impression he was living with a little lost cat that shook its collar as it vainly searched for its home.
At first he was fascinated with those bells, but as time went by and he grew more content with the life he had chosen in New York, and more and more pleased with his paycheck, he sometimes grumbled about them. “Why don’t you shed those superstitious slave chains?” he asked.
Jude stomped her foot. The very idea! “Jingle, ergo sum,” she said.
The story of those bells, as it turned out, was the story behind that famous photograph. “You want to hear a good one?” Jude asked. “This is it.” When she was seventeen, Judy Schitzman (“Geez, can you blame me for changing my name?”) didn’t want to visit Israel. She wanted to vacation in the Catskills or Atlantic City, like all the rest of the sacrilegious East Side kids. Such a curse! to have been adopted by an aunt and uncle so pious, so Old World, so anxious to talk of the hardships and narrow escapes. So committed to laying on the guilt. “Thick as cream cheese,” Jude said.
Jude’s own parents had met their tragic end when Ellen Schitzman knocked a plugged-in hairdryer into the bathtub, and Leo Schitzman, who found her electrocuted in the water, plunged his hand in. Even at age six, Jude was old enough to know she should be embarrassed by this farcical piece of history. When Uncle Chaim and Aunt Mina adopted her and placed her in a new school, she told her first-grade friends that her parents had been gassed in Poland. Her school chums seemed impressed.
“But you were born in 1950,” Rob pointed out.
“So, was I good in math? And to a six-year-old, what’s a little discrepancy in dates?”
To Chaim and Mina, it was everything. The nerve of her, making up such tales, making mockery out of one of the darkest hours in human history. So there hadn’t been enough victims without Jude adding two more to the carnage? So there weren’t enough horrors in the world without her fabricating more of them?
Chaim and Mina grated on Jude’s nerves. “Two wet Yiddish rags,” she said. They never let her tell a lie, and if you couldn’t make things up, what was the point of living? Life, indeed, was boring. Jude knew if she wanted to be an artist she would have to pretend every minute was intense. She made it a point to rub everyone the wrong way. She purposefully aggravated her own sweet self. In front of a full-length mirror—Jude had always had her worst crises looking in a mirror—she hunched her shoulders and stuck her stomach out. “Judy Schitzman, you are one ugly mother,” she whispered at her reflection. The next moment she gave herself a sultry smile and wink, sticking out her barely-there breasts. “Judy, dah-ling, how nice to see you! You look gohr-geous, absolutely rah-vishing, my dear.”
Mina caught her in the schizophrenic act one day, and that’s how Jude started ballet lessons. It was decided, in consultation with the rabbi, that Jude needed discipline. It was decided she had to get out of the house more, or Mina would have a nervous breakdown. “You’ll have music lessons,” Chaim told her. Jude stomped her feet. She couldn’t stand still long enough to tune a violin. “French lessons,” Mina suggested, and Jude howled. Bad enough she already mixed up Yiddish with English.
“I want belly-dancing lessons,” she said.
“I’ll teach you to dance,” Chaim threatened. “I’ll teach you to belly.”
But in the end Jude was sent to a Russian ballet master, at quite a pretty penny. The ballet master was rude and ruthless. He spit orders in Jude’s face as he turned out her arms, poked her in the gut, and practically yanked her head off her neck. He sneered at her. Curling his lip in disgust, he called her “Scheetzman.” “Tuck in that belly, Scheetzman! Scheetzman, lower your chin, please! Scheetzman, I am going to snap that trunk of yours right in half!” Jude thoroughly enjoyed it. She liked the tap of his stick against the wooden floor: she liked being surrounded by mirrors. She loved throwing up, en masse, with all the other girls just before and after a lesson. She loved the Band-Aids and the Ace bandages and the injuries that made her cry. Ballet was wonderful—the music, the precision, the pain!
So Jude grew. She began to take modern dance because now she was too old to make it in the ballet world. Chaim and Mina were skeptical. Pink tutus were fine; nude leotards were not. Chaim was less and less willing to finance what he thought was an extravagant concession to the sexual revolution. Mina was worried about Jude catching splinters dancing in bare feet. Both were worried that Jude was obsessed with dance for all the wrong reasons. When Jude turned seventeen, Chaim and Mina decided it was time to break her of her fool ideas.
Jude was dragged to the sacred homeland, where everything and everybody got on her nerves. The Holy Land Hotel? How could it stack up to the Plaza? Esther Zeitz? Give her Bloomingdale’s any day. The Biblical Zoo? Jude had seen bigger and better elephants in the Bronx. Israel was a disgusting, crummy old place. What was holy about all those stupid soldiers, about a land obsessed with its military?
Jude had never thought much about God before, but now her mind drifted toward more spiritual matters. She was sure God never lived inside a tank. God—at least Jude’s God—was not a gun. God was Fifth Avenue at rush hour (furs and high heels and shopping bags from Saks), Battery Park at twilight (Miss Liberty misty in the distance), and the top of the roof on Sunday morning. God was hot pastrami with a dab of horseradish on top. God was a great ballet. Jude leaned out of the hotel window in Jerusalem, dust and sweat gritted on her eyelashes. No wonder all those old guys in black were wailing at that dumb wall. Who wanted to live in the midst of a potential Armageddon, when you could live in glorious New York?
Judy Schitzman joined her aunt and uncle for breakfast in a street café. Chaim had rolls and coffee. Mina, on a perpetual diet that never seemed to work, confined herself to tea. Jude chowed down on eggs and rolls and coffee and juice, the eggs sticking suddenly in her throat when, halfway through breakfast, Chaim announced they would be making a permanent move to Israel before the year was up.
But Jude had to go back to New York. There was the dance studio. There was Central Park. There were hot dogs and pretzels and bagels. Fake suffering was great, to be sure, but she didn’t want to really suffer in Israel. Jude threw down her fork on her plate. She wouldn’t live in Jerusalem! She wouldn’t join any old army! She looked horrible in khaki! What was she supposed to do for fun, go float in that stupid, smelly old Dead Sea? Besides, how could she dance in the middle of this cultural desert?
Chaim cursed. Jude could just lower her voice. Jude could just follow orders for once in her life. Jude could go straight to the dogs if she didn’t like their plans. Mina, nervous from her tea, began to cry. Would there never be peace on earth? No, not as long as Jude was alive to fight with her uncle. Jude pushed back her chair. Where was she going? Her uncle had paid good money for that big breakfast. She had been eating them out of house and home for over ten years, and this was the thanks they should get? Besides, what about her parents? What about the past? She owed it to the past to live in Israel!
“I don’t owe anybody anything,” Jude said. “And you can drop dead!”
She fled the café. She stalked up a cobblestone hill, wandered down a side alley, and stumbled upon a street market. Such wonderful things for sale! Jude inspected them all, the colorful rugs and blankets, the pale yellow baskets, the sheer scarves, the heavy jewelry. In her purse she had all the money Chaim had given her before they left New York. She had planned to buy a new hot-pink leotard when she got back to the city, but now she resolved to spend every last cent on whatever would make her aunt and uncle most angry. Jude lingered before the stalls. Men eyed her. Men said things to her in languages she could not understand. She hesitated before she finally approached an Arab in long white robes. His dark face was shaded by a burnoose. His wares lay on a thick camel-colored blanket. Jude bent down. She fingered a heavy necklace, a collar that looked like something out of Antony and Cleopatra, before she finally grabbed what she thought was a bracelet strung with bells. It jingled. Yes, this was it. Something that made a Christmasy, goyish kind of noise.
When she stood up and tried to fasten it around her wrist, the Arab shook his head. He took the bracelet from her, bent down to the cobblestones, and clasped it around her ankle. Jude blushed, and pressed her cotton skirt against her thighs as the Arab eyed her legs. She backed away.
She gave him all the money in her purse down to the change. As she walked off, the tinkling of the bells above her sandals distinguished her from all the others on the street. Jude was pleased. She felt like a clown. She felt like a slave. See what Chaim and Mina would have to say about that! But within a minute she began to regret her decision, as if she had betrayed the aunt and uncle who had been kind enough to care for her almost all her life—and for an Arab, no less. She wanted her money back. The sounds of the bells made her feel sick.
She was at the top of the hill when she saw Chaim and Mina walking up towards her. Aunt Mina was out of breath; Chaim’s face was red with rage. “You stay there!” he yelled. “You stay right there, young lady!” Jude wanted to run away. She wanted to run towards them and throw herself at their feet, but then they would see—and hear—the bells. So for once in her life, she obeyed. Chaim and Mina puffed up the hill. As Jude bent down to yank the bracelet off her ankle, light flashed, and then came the explosion. Glass and furniture and unidentifiable objects shattered out into the street. Jude ran down the hill toward the rubble. The bells jingled.
Mina was nowhere to be found. Chaim lay in two in the middle of the street, the skin of his right arm pale against the earth-colored cobblestones, ragged and bloody where it had been severed at the shoulder. His hand was turned palm upward, as if extended toward a cashier to receive some change. Jude didn’t know what to do. She stooped down to touch the hand—it no longer was Chaim’s hand—and ended up cradling the arm. The tiny digits tattooed there matched the numbers Jude had often observed on the arm of her uncle when he washed his hands before dinner or opened the stubborn lid on a jar of jelly.
When Rob asked her what she was thinking at the precise moment the photographer knelt down to shoot her, Jude considered it for a few seconds before she replied. “I felt excited, as if it weren’t real, as if I were an actress in a show and any minute people would start applauding. I knew I would get my face in every magazine in America. It’s awful—oh, I’m an awful person!—but I remember thinking, This is what I was born for, to be famous.”
So five years later, then years later, fifteen years later, Jude still had plenty to feel guilty about. “If only I were the type who wanted to live in Israel,” she told Rob. “If only I had stayed at the breakfast table. If only I hadn’t bought those bells. If only I had run down the hill a moment earlier. If only my parents hadn’t died in the bathroom. If only I hadn’t been born. If only I weren’t Jewish!”
She loathed her history, and at the same time she felt superior to others because of it. “I like you,” she told Rob, “and you’ve been lots of places and I guess you’re kind of smart, but I mean, let’s face it, your last name is Jones, you’re so normal, so—so—adjusted” (Jude pronounced the last as if it were a dirty word), “so American. I mean, what do you people who aren’t ethnic think about all day?”
“Sex and death,” Rob said, “and taking a crap. Same as you, without the East Side accent.”
But it was the accent that made her. Without it, who was Jude Silverman? The girl whose parents had fried in the bathtub? The girl whose aunt and uncle had been blown to pieces in an explosion? The girl who wore bells, the girl who danced “Hiroshima,” the girl who was a bargain basement of neuroses, the girl who was a wholesale sack of bones, the girl in the bloody photograph, the girl in the mirror, staring sadly back? She wasn’t anything, she wasn’t anybody, without all that behind her. Chaim and Mina had been right. She owed something to the past, and she had known that intuitively, even way back when she had announced to her school chums that her parents had been sent to the gas chamber.
Rob, on the other hand, didn’t owe anything. He lived for the here and now, for the action-filled moment. Jude was his link to the past, and Jude was his present, always responding so well to his camera. “Who’d you shoot today?” she asked when he came home, not bothering to listen to his reply. “Mmmm, photographer. Shoot me. I’m dying for it.”
It was crazy. Jude was perverse. “Made for abuse,” she whispered as she twisted into incredible positions Rob, except for one brief foray into pornographic photography, hardly knew existed. “Jude Silverman was built to last.”
But she wasn’t made to dance forever. Fifteen years after she had bought those bells, they were giving a muffled, melancholy jingle beneath the blankets every morning. “Oh God,” Jude moaned, “why does anyone have to live past thirty?” Her back, once as supple as a roll of cookie dough, now felt as stiff as a cracker. Her knees creaked and complained. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she moaned when she came home from a performance. “Oh God, rub my neck!”
Rob, with his skilled hands, filled in. “Ow!” Jude yelped when he pressed too hard. “What are you trying to do, kill me? I swear to God, everybody’s out to get me. When I was waiting to cross Second this morning, a pigeon laid a number on me. When I was waiting to cross Park, a cabbie practically ran me over. So I decided the hell with this shit, I’ll take the train. I went underground and the machine stole two of my tokens. I leaped over the turnstile, like a criminal on the run. Then I was waiting on the platform and this guy with a little black mustache looked like he was dying to push me on the tracks. So I walked down the platform and this punk came at me with purple hair and a T-shirt with a Nazi sign on it, you think I’m making this up? I said to myself, Jude Silverman, move those metatarsals. Run like bloody Mercury.”
And now, the capper, what proved that the whole world was falling in on her: Jude Silverman, the Jude Silverman of “Hiroshima” fame, who had once brought down the house, was being relegated to just another member of the company corps. The Future/Dance/Theater was staging its own spectacular version of the end of the world, called, simply, “World War III,” and Jude, who was hoping—expecting—to be chosen to dance the solo finale as the nuclear bomb, was doled out only a bit role as an intermediate-range ballistic missile. The nerve. It was an outrage!
Jude wailed. Rob tried his best to comfort her. “Look at it this way. If mighty empires can rise and fall and rise again, so can Jude Silverman.”
“Mighty empires don’t get sore feet. Mighty empires don’t get arthritis. Mighty empires aren’t Jewish. I’m a wash-up. There’ll never be another World War III. It’s over.”
Jude planted her body in front of the mirror. She stuck out her tongue at herself and ran her fingers through her hair. She grabbed a pair of tweezers and went after her scalp. “I’m going to get every last gray one,” she vowed. “I’m going to pull them all out. Search and destroy. This is Jude Silverman’s mission.”
“Pull out any more and you’ll be bald,” Rob warned.
Jude shrieked. “Whose head looks like a shiny pancake around here?”
“I can accept my age gracefully.”
Jude stomped her feet and her bells jingled. “You were born an old man,” she said. “I was born normal. I was born a baby. Look out. I’m getting ready to have a crisis. I’m having a crisis, I tell you.”
Jude Silverman detonated. Meanwhile, “World War III,” drawing highly favorable reviews, took New York by storm and raged on and on. The city was seized by an apocalyptic craze. The display windows at Macy’s and Lord & Taylor’s took on a futuristic cast, and a famous midtown jewelry store paid a special tribute to the war by placing five solitary diamonds in a blackened display case to represent stars glittering in a postnuclear sky.
“New York has gone berserk,” Rob said. “I’ve never seen a city that so begs to be destroyed.”
Jude took it too personally to care about the broader implications. “New York didn’t do diddly squat for Hiroshima.”
“Now Jude. Be reasonable. The apocalypse is in vogue. Hiroshima is like the Holocaust, totally passé.”
“I told you. I’m a wash-up!” Jude’s eyes filled with tears. “Let’s have a wee one.”
“An F-stop? Now?”
“You jerk! Nobody understands me! I mean, let’s have a baby.”
Rob stood shell-shocked. “In the middle of a world war? Where’s your sense of social responsibility?”
“I never had any.” Jude grabbed Rob. “Come on, photographer. Load your guns. Fire away.”
Now who felt old? Rob’s guns no longer worked on such short command. Besides, he wasn’t prepared for this dilemma. He had been trained to keep his objective distance. He could more easily imagine photographing a nuclear bomb than he could snapping a shot of his own baby. A bomb, after all, was a bomb, but a baby was—well, uncertainty. He tried to persuade Jude. “It wouldn’t be fair to bring a child into a world so deeply committed to destruction. A world of chemical warfare, Jude. A world of mass extermination.”
Jude crossed her arms and looked unconvinced.
“Okay,” Rob said, “how about a world where you have to push and shove in line just to get half a pound of pastrami?”
“Since when are you such a fan of pastrami?”
“All right, then. A world where people step on your feet on the subway and don’t even apologize.”
“Oh, so now it’s manners that are going to save the world.” Jude made a la-di-da face. “If only Hitler had read his Emily Post. Just think of the marvelous effect that would have had on the twentieth century. Pass the bombs, Fraulein. Pass the U-boats, mein Herr. Pass the soap, please. I say, Goering, not to bring up anything unpleasant, but doesn’t it smell like gas in here?”
“Just put a stop to that,” Rob said. “Just cut that out, Jude Schitzman, I mean, Silverman. Jesus Christ. You can’t even make up your mind what your own name is. How are you going to raise a baby?”
“I want a baby,” Jude said. “I want the blood and guts. I want the stink and the smell and the afterbirth. I want the baby to come out the way I should have come out, with the cord around its neck. I want to bleed to death on the operating table—”
Rob slapped her. Rob slapped Jude Silverman flat across the face and left a strapping red mark on her skinny cheek. He felt good. He felt satisfied. But he wasn’t prepared for that reaction. He was prepared to apologize, until Jude smiled, infuriating him even more.
“You’re neurotic,” he said. “You’re paranoid. You want to be hit. You beg for it. You’re a bitch. You’re a brat. I’ll bet you were the worst kid on the block. I’ll bet you were the worst kid ever born, period. You drove your parents to kill themselves. You drove your aunt and uncle crazy. You think you’re so persecuted, but you do nothing but persecute everyone around you. I’m sick of your moaning and whining. You’re a fraud. You’re a compulsive liar. You’re a basket case. I’ll bet you bought those bells in Brooklyn. I’ll bet you cut off your own uncle’s arm with a butter knife.”
“So what if I did?” Jude defended herself. “So what if that schmuck photographer told me exactly how to pose for him. He won that Nobel Prize, didn’t he?”
“Pulitzer Prize! He won a Pulitzer for taking a fake shot of you, and here I am, stuck with the real, honest-to-goodness neurotic thing!”
“Oh!” Jude wailed. “You don’t love me. You’ve never loved me, you only fell in love with my picture. Why’d you marry me? Why didn’t you just let me kill myself?” She began to cry. “I hate photographers. I hate cameras. I hate myself in that picture.”
Rob swallowed a lump in his throat. He felt guilt slide into his stomach. The feeling wasn’t altogether unpleasant. He took the tearful Jude in his arms. “I never liked that picture,” he lied. “You look so much better smiling. Come on now, say cheese. I’m sorry. I’m saying uncle, Jude.”
Jude snuggled against him. “I’d like you better if you said Daddy.”
Two months later, backstage at the Future /Dance /Theater, a giddy Jude Silverman, a buoyant Jude Silverman, paraded about with a pillow crammed down the front of her leotard, announcing to all who would listen, “Hey guys, I’m retiring, guess what for? It’s called ending your career on a big bang—ha ha, get it? God, am I pregnant with wit, or what?” She smiled demurely, young-mother-to-be-ly. “I’ve always wanted a pair of tits,” she mused. “The big guns. Real torpedoes.”
Jude couldn’t decide if she wanted a son or daughter. Rob thought twins would solve the problem, but Jude wasn’t having any of it. “Too schizophrenic,” she said. She placed her hands on her stomach. “Big Mama to control tower,” she barked. “Do you read me? Come in.” She sighed and turned to Rob. “Big Mama is receiving neither masculine nor feminine vibes. Maybe it’s a hermaphrodite. Maybe it’s a miscarriage. Maybe it’s cancer. I’m sure it’s cancer, Rob.”
“Jude, it’s a baby, take my word for it.”
“Well. Okay. Let’s call it Mordecai.”
“Let’s not.”
Jude sighed. “Poor Morey. Just think of our genes waging war within him, right at this very moment. Man, this is one time when I’m willing to lose a fight.” She put her hands back on her stomach. “Big Mama to control tower,” she barked again. “Do you read me? Life is easier if you have blond hair.”
She was growing calmer, and slightly dreamy. She was mooning around the apartment all morning, and taking her stomach for long walks in the afternoon. She was conspicuous now, for good reason: at last, Jude Silverman was fat! Before, when people had stared at her, she used to look fearfully back, but now she simply smiled and gazed in equal wonder down at herself. “Guess what?” she told Rob. “I’m less paranoid. But it’s kind of boring. Jude Silverman could use a little action.”
“So take up knitting.”
Jude, mildly, told him to shut up.
On her walks, she ate all the hot pretzels she wanted. She slurped orangeade and lemonade and any other syrupy tutti-frutti drink she could find. She thought, with fondness, of little Mordecai, and then she thought of all the things that could go wrong. She was convinced, for a while, that God would give her an unusual child, a deformed little duck with three eyes and twelve toes, a freak, a weirdo, or a saint. Her child would have to be different, at least from all those mediocre kids she saw on the street. She carefully inspected each one that she passed. “Dumbo,” she silently pronounced a droopy-eyed toddler. “Pig,” she labeled a little boy with the sticky residue of food about his mouth. “Brat,” she pegged a moaning girl who stomped her feet. “If I ever had a kid like that, I’d strangle her.” She smiled with superiority, then jerked her head back to the little girl, finding a vague, dissatisfying resemblance to herself. But her bad days were over now. She sighed. She knew, in her heart of hearts, that she’d have a dull, boring, well-adjusted child. It was guaranteed to be normal; with a last name like Jones, how could it miss? It would yawn at the ballet and laugh at her ostrich feathers. It would beg her to “take off those embarrassing bells, Mo-therrr.” After all the love and care she would give it, it would turn on her, disown her, laugh at her, call her a kook. This, then, would be all the thanks she would get!
Jude wrinkled her forehead. She was beginning to sound like Aunt Mina. Maybe she was turning normal. Maybe she should worry. Maybe she should walk all the way down Central Park. She made a pilgrimage to Cleopatra’s Needle and to the Alice in Wonderland statue. She visited the carousel, where Chaim had taken her for rides on the occasional Sunday, and where giggly, excited kids still lined up.
Jude walked away from the carousel and surfaced out of the park at Temple Emanu-El. On Fifth, she heard chanting and rumbling. Hordes of people clogged the sidewalk at 60th Street, marching straight up the park. For a moment, Jude panicked. She almost took to her heels and ran, but then she took her stomach in her hands and stood still, as if preparing to be photographed. “Sit tight, Mordecai,” she said. “It’s the Nazi invasion of midtown Manhattan. It’s Armageddon, right in our own backyard. Jude Silverman, Hebrew warrioress, proudly stands her ground. Jude Silverman meets, with courage, her end!”
The crowd marched closer. They came upon her, bearing banners of peace, not war, and Jude smiled to see their slogans were decorated with serene little doves. Bread, not bombs! No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Peace is at hand! the signs said.
The crowd thronged the sidewalk. They carried banners that said Catholics for Pacifism and Muslims for Global Harmony. They carried banners in Hebrew characters Jude was ashamed she could no longer understand. There were fresh-faced Hitler youth types carrying signs warning against the evils of Die mutterrakete. Jude loved the word. “Hey-hey, guys,” she yelled and pointed to her stomach. “The mother rocket, that’s me!”
The crowd passed by. Suddenly Jude felt overwhelmed. She felt sad. She walked back into the park and let her sense of smell lead her to the zoo. Colorful birds squawked at her, dirty farm animals bleated, and screaming monkeys put their paws over their eyes and ran away. “All right, you guys,” Jude said. “I know where I’m not wanted.” She jingled her way slowly to the polar bear’s cage.
It was late summer, on the brink of fall. The leaves were beginning to crisp, and the wind picked up, while the sun beat down on the asphalt. It had been just this time of year when she was here with Rob, offering him a bite of that lousy pretzel that needed a dab of hot mustard on top. She’d been crying. And hadn’t she, an hour before, threatened suicide? She seemed to remember a slight ruckus that afternoon. Rob had made fun of her black fishnet stockings. Rob had told her, joking around, she was the worst subject he had ever photographed—vain, stubborn, alternately belligerent as a rhinoceros and frightened as a little lamb. “Rhinoceros!” Jude said. “I don’t like the smell of that, Rob Jones. What are you, some kind of closet anti-Semite?”
“I said rhinoceros because… Jude, what the hell are you doing, changing the curtains?”
“The whole world is out to kill Jude Silverman. Well, Jude Silverman will show the world a thing or two. Jude will kill herself!”
“Now Jude. Don’t do that.”
“I was born to die.”
“Yes, but you can do it later.”
Now it was later, and she was too tired to think of suicide. Jude finally made her way to the polar bear cage. She sat down on a park bench and watched the dirty, shaggy beast who, years after that scene with Rob, still paced his cage, like a madman, back and forth. He seemed so wild-eyed, so out of control. “Settle down now, you smelly old bear,” she said. Then she smiled. “Come on out of that cage, you chicken shit. Maul me. Strangle me. Break my bells. Just don’t harm my little Mordecai, is that a deal?” The polar bear panted and ignored her. Jude sleepily, deliciously, rested her hands upon her stomach and closed her eyes. The past? Just a bugaboo, compared to the future threatening to detonate inside her. It sure took a lot of strength to keep on living, Jude thought, finally feeling, kicking within her, what little energy she needed to survive.