Anna in Chains (2 page)

Preserved me too long
, Anna thought.
Enough already
.

It was deadly quiet in the house. Carol had taken Abram to return the video tape to Leo's, and David had gone off to his bedroom and slammed the door. Only Mr. T and Anna were on the couch. Mr. T had his nose in Anna's lap, and she didn't have the strength to push him off. She already could feel fleas creeping up her arm.

She sat in the dark, with only the glow from the Chanukah candles lighting the room. She could try to have another talk with Carol when she came home, but what point would there be? Carol always took the boys side. She had the same defense each time—“They've been deprived of enough as it is, Mom. They've had a very hard time. And they're no different from other kids their ages—thirteen and fifteen are very hard times, they're adolescents, they need to make noise, to release energy. They have very strong forces to deal with, peer pressure, their sex drives…”

“Don't fill me in with the details,” Anna had said. “I watch Dr. Ruth. I know all about it.”

She sat there, absently patting Mr. T. His tail thumped. At least with dogs, you could alter them, tone them down, defuse their energies. Anna wished she could alter the world, start over and give her daughter a good husband who could earn a living and wasn't crazy and wouldn't kill himself, give her two sons without anyone's genes at all, just two perfect respectful children, give her good health and a house out of the smog somewhere. And while she was at it, she'd bring Abram back for herself, and they'd take a condominium on the beach, also out of the smog.

Loud hammering came from David's room. What was he doing now? Knocking holes in the wall? She didn't have the strength to go down the hall to see, not with the heavy cast on her foot. But maybe she'd better. With his stupidity, who knew what he was capable of?

“What's going on?” Anna said, opening his door. She ignored a big sign that said, “KNOCK FIRST OR YOU'RE DEAD.”

“Nothing,” David said. He was hammering small wooden boards together on his desk.

“Don't tell me nothing when you're doing something. I'm not blind and I'm not deaf, not yet,” Anna said.

“I'm making a bed.”

“You don't have a bed?”

“It's for my wrestler,” David said.

“For who?”

“Hulk Hogan.”

“Oh,” Anna said. She was silent.

“Want to see him?” His voice, for once, was not a bark.

“Maybe…” Anna said.

David flung himself over his bed and pulled from beneath it a shoe box. Inside, laid on tissue paper, covered with a folded wash cloth,
tucked in
, was a miniature rubber thug, Hulk Hogan, sleeping peacefully within the outlines of his huge, ugly muscles.

“Want to hold him?” David asked. He offered her the shoebox.

Anna stepped back. “Maybe later,” she said. She was touched by the vision of the doll. To think that David was building a bed for that creature made her grandson seem human, even sweet.

She left David hammering and wandered down the hall. On Abram's door was the sign, “YOU'RE DEAD IF YOU EVEN TOUCH THE DOORKNOB. DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK.
NO ONE
COMES IN HERE.”

Anna pushed in the door. She expected the room to be a shambles, a pigpen. But when she turned on the light, she saw first the baseball cards, pinned in their plastic envelopes in neat rows on the corkboard which lined one whole wall. Then she saw the airplane models, hanging on strings from the ceiling, silver fighter jets and brown vintage bombers, wafting in the draft from the heater vent, Abram's bed was made as tightly as a marine's. On his desk were a notebook and an open volume of the encyclopedia; Abraham Lincoln's face stared up at her from a photograph. It was clear her grandson had been working on some kind of report. Anna was having trouble breathing deeply. Not only could Abram the hoodlum maybe read, but he could also maybe write.

She carefully backed out of the room and closed the door. In the TV room Mr. T had started barking violently. He ran from one end of the room to another, convulsed with hysterical yaps. David came out of his bedroom.

“I better go see what's up.” His voice had suddenly become deep. “Someone might be in the yard.” Boy and dog went outside through the patio door, and Anna found her way again to the couch, dragging her foot in its cast in the hospital-issue Abominable Snowman slipper. She heard Mr. T still yapping maniacally. David rushed inside and grabbed one of the burning Chanukah candles from the menorah, the one on top, the
shamesh
, and ran out again. “I need to see over the fence,” he yelled. “Something bad is out there. Maybe a rat.”

The next thing Anna saw through the plate glass window was an explosion. A flash of fire like an atom bomb. Then: David's screams.

She ran outside—she didn't know how she got there with her broken foot—to find her grandson on fire: there he was, huddled by the fence, a screaming flare of flame.

Don't
, she commanded God.
Don't you dare do this
.

She found the hose, turned it on full, aimed it, tripped on the dog, saw stars overhead in the sky, found her balance, forced a Red Sea of water on his precious life. He was now down in the dirt; he knew to roll around on the ground, from television. She had seen him see that very scene on television on a murder mystery program. Thank God for television.

“Call 911! Call 911!” he yelled to Anna. That, too, from the movies. Last weekend Carol had rented
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
. Thank God for Hollywood. She pulled the wet child with her into the house and called 911.

When Carol and Abram came home, Anna and David were under a Charlie Brown quilt on the couch, watching a movie called
Pee Wee's Big Adventure
. David was in dry clothes and Anna was holding his hand; she was surprised at how huge it was, almost a man's hand. In the movie some daffy guy with a beanie on his head kept pedalling his bike backwards. David laughed everytime Pee Wee made a funny face, and when his body vibrated against Anna's chest, she laughed too.

“Should I tell them now?” David whispered into Anna's ear.

“Wait a few minutes. Let your mother get her breath.” She touched David's face gently. His eyelashes had been singed off, but that was all. The paramedic had told Anna he would be fine. By some miracle, the Angel of Death had passed over the house like a silver jet.

But if it hadn't been Chanukah, David wouldn't have taken a candle out into the yard. If there hadn't been a can of charcoal lighter at the fence, he wouldn't have stood on it. If it hadn't tipped over, the cap wouldn't have come off. If the hot wax hadn't dripped down and ignited the charcoal lighter…

Well, never mind. If Anna had been born a Russian princess! If the world were square! If God were a kind man with a long beard!

Carol was busy in the kitchen unpacking bags of groceries. “I just stopped off to get a few more things we need,” she called to her mother. Abram was standing by, yelling “Neato” every time she unpacked an item that pleased him: a six-pack of Pepsi; frozen burritos; chocolate mint cream pie. When she pulled out bags of carrots, oranges, broccoli, he rolled his eyes and said, “Retch,” accompanied by sound effects. Anna noticed that he was wearing new white tennis shoes after all. They had orange lightning bolts on them.

“Hey, David,” Abram yelled into the dimness of the TV room. “Mom let me rent
Ghostbusters
again.”

“Rad,” David said, a little weakly. “Really rad.”

“And we got another Heavenly Hash ice cream.”

“Could we please have some over here before it's all gone?” Anna asked immediately. “With whipped cream if possible.”

“Your wish is my command,” Abram said. He danced around under the kitchen light like a boxer in his new shoes.

“But don't bring it to us yet. You help your mother unpack first,” Anna said.

“And then we have something to tell you,” David added. “It'll blow your mind.”

The Leaf Lady was swirling her broom around on the cracked cement; no matter when Anna came up Granger Street, pulling her despised cart behind her, she saw the same angry woman, dressed in a blue bathrobe, jerking her yellow broom from side to side and daring the universe to dirty her sidewalk. Anna had no doubt that she was a landlady, probably as bad as her own.

A leaf came down. The Leaf Lady pounced, attacked it with a flurry of broomstraws, shunted it into her dustpan, delivered it triumphantly into her silver trash bag. Then she planted her feet apart, looked up, and waited for another to come down from the stunted, anemic tree.

Old ladies like this one gave a bad name to all old ladies. If Anna could be bumping along the street shaped like a beachchair or a candlestick or a rye bread, she would definitely prefer it to looking like this white-haired object in whose form she was housed. She glanced in the window of a car and winced at her reflection. Typical. The rounded shoulders, the delicate jowls, the fallen, sunken, loose skin of the face, the watery eyes. Even the ears on old people got huge, stretched out, as if to remind the world to speak up—more was needed, more of everything, if the old were to receive even a tiny bit of what used to be their due.

There was no point in trying to hide her age like some of the women at the Center did, with their platinum hairdos and their red-white-and-blue makeup. Besides, little things gave them away. In one second their stooped backs and their wire carts on wheels told the whole predictable story: osteoporosis and a dead husband. An army of women like Anna walked the streets. Who needed names or histories? You could guess a hundred life-stories and be right ninety-nine times: the one-room apartment, enough money in the bank to make up what Social Security didn't pay for, the big-shot children (at the Center, where Anna ate lunch every day, “movie producer” was the favorite; doctors, lawyers—they weren't so impressive any more).

Anna sighed with regret. In that department she was sorely lacking—her youngest daughter, Carol, was the widow of a lunatic who had killed himself (thank God, at least, for that) and her oldest, Janet, was married to a professor. Neither of her children was ever going to provide Anna with the key to a fancy condominium with soundproof walls. This was her heart's desire: to live in a place with no Armenians, no Russians, no gays, no babies, no aspiring musicians, no noises, no smells. And no landladies.

She dragged her cart down the curb and was nearly run down by a Mexican speeding by in an ancient red truck. And no Mexicans, she added. A warning flag flashed in her mind. These conveniences she wished for she would find soon enough in a hole in the ground. And for much cheaper than in a condominium. She shouldn't wish for something she wasn't ready for. Bernie, at the Center, warned everyone he met: “Don't have fancy wishes—God might make them come true.”

God was a subject she wasn't going to get into now. She had to remember her shopping list. Although she wasn't superstitious—she didn't go hopping right now over to some tree to knock on wood that she had a good heart; she didn't spit to ward off the Evil Eye—she said aloud for the record, “For a hole in the ground I can wait a while.”

She pulled her cart up the side of the far curb, grudgingly grateful that she had crossed Santa Monica Boulevard again and was still in one piece. Accidents were the foe of old women. One day you were on your two feet, the next day you were in traction in a hospital room with some big-mouth who wouldn't shut up for five minutes.

Feeling she had crossed a wide, dangerous river, Anna glanced back across the street and saw the Leaf Lady watching her. She stared back. The old witch shook the top of her broom at her. She made shapes with her mouth. Anna guessed she was cursing and was not surprised. Everyone was crazy, and you couldn't make a friend in this world even if you wanted to.

In the Alpha Beta she got her coupons ready. Her fingers trembled as she put the flimsy bits of newspaper in order. Twelve cents off on orange juice, twenty-five cents off on a dozen eggs, fifty cents off on a pound of bacon. Nevermind that her sister Gert was outraged by Anna's fondness for bacon; when the Messiah came down personally to Anna and gave her one good reason why Abram had died so young, and
apologized
, then maybe she would consider giving up bacon. In the meantime she would eat what she liked.

She hooked her cart to the wire edge of the store's shopping wagon and began to push. The rubber wheels jammed and the steel bar caught Anna just under her breasts. The air went out of her. She stopped to wait for the pain to recede, and, as she stood there, a wagon crashed into her ankles. She cried out and spun around. A woman wearing a purple turban and a flowered pantsuit said, “Honey, this is no place to stand around daydreaming. This is heavy traffic

“You should watch where you're going!”

“And
you
should go back to Russia where you belong!” the woman said, brandishing an armful of gold bracelets at Anna.

Russia! To be mistaken for a foreigner when she had been born in America!

“Oh go to hell,” Anna said.

She gave a push on her wagon and got herself into the aisle with coffee and tea. Now came the business of comparing prices. She wasn't going to let them take her for a fool. One brand of coffee was eighteen-and-a-half cents an ounce, another was twenty-two cents an ounce. She would be here all morning if she had to, making calculations, but it was necessary.

She never even drank a whole cup of coffee. She made it for the warmth, for the smell, for the way the steam penetrated the china cup and heated her fingers. She always put in sugar and cream and let the aroma warm her cold face in the morning. She allowed herself this indulgence: to remember Abram every morning, the way he had enjoyed his breakfast, the two sunnyside-up eggs she fried for him, like happy eyes on his plate; how he wolfed down his toast, gulped his coffee. His appetites had been huge and wonderful.