Anna in Chains (3 page)

She glanced up and thought she was having a stroke. Abram stood right next to her, as he would have looked if he'd grown old. He was in baggy gray pants, peering at boxes of teabags on the shelf next to the coffee. Oh—but he looked pathetic; his stretched-out brown sweater was pilled and stained, his shoes were scuffed and dusty, his wavy hair ragged. But he had the same hairline, the same bushy, down-slanted eyebrows, the crinkles around the good-natured eyes. Anna felt her heart skip and realized she had stopped breathing.

A miracle. Maybe she wouldn't buy bacon. She set her coupons down on the shelf and pretended to be examining a can of coffee. She glanced sideways at the man's shopping wagon. In it were six cans of Campbell's tomato soup.
God in heaven!
Like in her dream! In her dream, Abram was always in a shabby little room somewhere, without her, all alone, bent over his hot plate, heating up a can of tomato soup. There was a telephone in his room, an old black one, sitting like a squashed cross on a rickety wooden table. But in the dream she never knew the number, she could never reach him.

The man had Abram's large nose. He was shorter than Abram, but even men lose calcium, their spines shrink. All those years alone, twenty-three years alone in that room. What did he think about there? Her! He must think about Anna and the girls when they were little. Maybe even now, as he peered at the shelves in the Alpha Beta, he was thinking of her, the breakfasts she had made him, the pleasure she had given him. Tears flooded her eyes.
I'm all alone, too! I think of you every minute of my life!

He selected Swee Touch Nee tea, the kind she always used, and she knew this was some kind of visitation. She reached out her hand, almost ready to pluck the sleeve of his sweater, to point herself out to him, but drew it back. The Anna he must remember was a young woman (only in her fifties!), whose face was still smooth, whose breasts (even then!) were like when she was sixteen. He was dreaming of his young wife; she was remembering her young husband, and here they stood, side-by-side, lives like pitchers that were tipped over and only a few drops left inside.

He took his tea and shuffled off behind his cart. Even the way his pants sank low on his hips was the same as Abram. But he was so shabby, so alone in the world, it broke her heart to see it. She made a sobbing sound and dug in her pocketbook for a handkerchief. She never carried on like this, but she had lost control. He was disappearing around the corner, going to the next aisle. She felt she had to hurry or he would be gone. She pushed hard against her cart, the wheels locked again, she was punched in the chest.

She sobbed openly as she struggled to push the wagon; it was like moving a mountain up the aisle. She turned the corner, knocking some bags of potato chips off a display. There he was! In front of frozen foods! Holding a pepperoni pizza in his hand, examining the pale, cheesy face of it.

Abram never ate a pizza in his life! Even when the girls first tasted it in high school, when they wanted the family to go out to dinner and eat it, he scorned it. Dough heavy as lead, he used to say. With cheese and meat mixed together! A horror, a disgusting invention.

Her senses returned to her. She let him go and turned her wagon the other way. What did she want him for anyway—a filthy old man who ate pizza, who now had an ugly frown on his face?

Her list, her shopping list. She had been here all this time and had bought nothing and was exhausted already. Her chest ached, the backs of her ankles were scraped. And now…now she had lost her coupons! They were gone, not in her hand, not in her bag, not in her wagon. After she had scrupulously cut them out of the paper this morning, not one of them with a ragged edge so the checkout girl could complain, accuse Anna of sloppiness.

She began to retrace her steps, looking on the floor for her coupons. She wanted that fifty cents off on bacon. She was going to go home and cook half a pound for her dinner and eat it all at once, piece by piece, knowing it was from a pig, making it clear to God that she knew.

She found no coupons on the floor of the Alpha Beta. Anna walked slowly around the whole store, looking. She was about to give up when she spied an empty wagon by the bananas, just sitting there, abandoned. And in it were the same three coupons she had lost: for eggs, for bacon, for orange juice. The edges were ragged; someone less careful than she had torn them out of the paper. Whoever owned them must have got disgusted, as she often did. Couldn't find the juice. Didn't want to bother. The wagon didn't work and the person got fed up and walked out.

To test this assumption, Anna jiggled the wagon and felt the heavy locking of its rubber wheels. There—it was like a dead whale and it didn't happen just to her. But this person had been smart and just walked out. If more people did that, the Alpha Beta would wake up, oil their wheels.

She lifted the coupons out of the wagon and arranged them in her hand. She felt lucky. At least she could salvage something from this shopping trip. Maybe today would even turn out to be her lucky day. Maybe she would buy a lottery ticket when she checked out. What would she do with fifty thousand dollars? Buy a Steinway Grand. Buy two. Her spirits were beginning to revive.

“That's the woman!” a man yelled behind her just as she was picking up a package of bacon. “She's the one!” The old man, the Abram who wasn't Abram, was pointing his finger at her, an inch from her nose, and the woman in the purple turban and flowered pantsuit was running toward her, her face like a tornado.

“Did you steal my coupons?” she screamed, while the old man was blabbering, spit coming from his lips. “She took them right out of your wagon, I saw her!”

Anna waved the tattered coupons in the air. “Here! Take them! Who needs them? I thought someone left them there…no one was by the wagon…I had my own coupons, I brought them with me…I lost them.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” the woman said, tearing them from Anna's fingers. “Thief! I should have them call the police on you.”

The old man, with his ugly, unfamiliar face, was glaring at her. His eyes were vicious.

Go eat your pepperoni!
Anna thought.
Go to hell, all of you
.

She unhooked her little cart from the big wagon and dragged it toward the front of the store. She started out the IN door and it hit her in the face, opening automatically as someone approached it from outside.

Blindly, she backed away and found the other door, clattered out with her cart, crossed Santa Monica Boulevard. Cars honked and screeched around her. Let them run her over, she'd thank them.

The Leaf Lady looked up as Anna clanked her empty cart over the curb. She came to stand in the middle of the street, her robe gaping open, holding her broomstick like a spear. She pointed it at Anna's empty cart. “What's the matter?” she said. “There's nothing good enough for you in the whole store?”

“Oh drop dead,” Anna said. She was crying and couldn't see where she was going.

“I wouldn't do you the favor,” the Leaf Lady said. “Believe me, not even if it was the end of the world.”

“If it was the end of the world, we'd all be better off,” Anna said, moving right along.

“Not me,” the Leaf Lady called after her. “I got property all over Venice.”

“So I own two pianos,” Anna yelled over her shoulder. “And even so, I say we'd be better off!”

“The kind of music you must play, maybe you're right!” But Anna wasn't going to answer such stupidity. She dragged her wagon homeward, watching out for potholes.

In the downstairs apartment the young Mexican boy began to knock his head against the wall. Sometimes Anna thought it was just the low bass beat of some tenant's stereo, but as soon as she realized it wasn't regular, she knew it was the boy starting his morning tantrum. At least if he had some sense of rhythm—a little drummer boy. But he wasn't musical, only crazy. At almost the same instant the Russian lady across the courtyard began playing violent streaks of dissonance on her cello. Immediately Anna pictured a blackboard, wide and colorless as Russia, and across it came the shrieking chalk, an empty train scraping and grinding its way over the bleak plains. The woman should have stayed in Russia where there was more space, and not moved here to live ten feet from Anna and give her a headache every day.

As if all that weren't enough, Anna heard the clatter of the barbecue lid being lifted outside, and she rushed to lock her windows. On the tiny balcony next to Anna's, the father of the Armenian family was lighting the barbecue starter again. What was wrong with these people that they had to cook three times a day over charcoal? Didn't they know how to use a stove? If they were civil human beings in the first place, she would tell them that this kind of cooking could give them cancer. But when she slammed the sliding glass door shut, the man always sneered at her, looking like a walrus with his hanging mustache, and threw more lighter on the coals, for spite.

Charred edges of meat, which tasted like heaven itself, could kill you. What couldn't kill you? Pickled herring could kill you, lox could kill you, everything was full of nitrites. Anna heard plenty of lectures at the Senior Citizens' Center, she was an informed woman. Chicken fat could kill you, cream cheese, sour cream, bacon; for years these foods had tempted her to stay alive. When her sister Gert had come with her to the Center for the lecture by the nutritionist, bacon had been the day's main subject. The old man Bernie, who was at the Center all the time, announced that if you drank orange juice when you ate bacon, something in the juice would cancel out the cancer. Gert had poked Anna and muttered, “Jews—all of these Jews—they have no business eating bacon anyway. No business even
talking
about it!”

“Look, get modern, will you?” Anna had said to her. “Get with the twentieth century. You're still living back in the horse-and-buggy age.”

“At least people were decent then,” Gert had insisted. “Not like this sewer we live in now. Don't invite me to any more lectures. I'm better off at home.”

The fumes from the Armenians patio were filling Anna's apartment, choking her. “Who needs the Gestapo when you have this?” She dragged her kitchen chair into the walk-in pantry closet and closed the door, sitting there in the dark with the matzo meal boxes and the cans of soup. The stink of the charcoal lighter filled every crevice. “What should I do?” she said aloud into the darkness. “Run away three times a day to walk up and down Santa Monica Boulevard till they finish their steaks? Get myself mugged while they eat like horses on my tax money? They should only choke.” She hoped the charred meat would work fast on them.

What had
happened
to America, anyway? After seventy-five years of running away from the East Side of New York with all those barbarians, here she was again with
these
. No progress. All that culture she thought was out there in the world, that she had tried to absorb, came to nothing—to this. What did the world care that Anna Goldman lived in two rooms, and in each room she had a piano!

There was a thud against the wall of the closet. She felt she had been hit in the kidneys.

“Wally, I swear—I'll bite off your little finger if you ever do that again!”

Another thud. The gay young men next door. She knew their pattern. A loud yelling fight, full of accusations. Dishes breaking. Furniture sliding around. Then the lengthy reconciliation, with those noises! Worse than cats in heat. Wasn't it embarrassing for them to meet her at the trash bin after they had carried on like that? Howls, gasps, shrieks, moans! “
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God
,” one of them always screamed a hundred times. They should only do it in a church where God could hear them, Anna thought, and give me some peace. But when she met one or the other of them at the garbage bin, so well-groomed in his pink silk shirt, or his net underwear, he'd always graciously lift the lid for her, toss her garbage into the back, where she couldn't reach, wish her a good day. At least those boys had manners. They were raised in good American families. But she wouldn't go so far as to let them pull her grocery cart up the steps to her apartment. The last thing she needed was AIDS. She had read in the
LA Times
about the bathhouses in San Francisco, the catwalks where men would stand so others could do a specialized activity on them. Well, that was their business. She was modern, live and let live. Not like Gert, out of the dark ages. But did she have to listen to it all day? She had stopped eating out altogether except for the Center because so many of those gay boys worked in the restaurants. They had a knack for cooking. But did she want them laying lettuce on her tuna sandwiches? Not after where those hands had been!

She opened the closet door; the fumes enclosed her and she could almost feel the flames on her skin, crisping it like bacon.

“Bastards,” she whispered. In her old age she should come to this, locked in a closet, instead of revered, respected, with her children gathered round. “They have their own lives to live,” she corrected herself. They were loving and loyal, her daughters called her every day. She didn't want to live near them, the way Gert urged her to do—live in the suburbs with a church on every corner and listen to the leaf-blowers blast out her eardrums. The expert on high blood pressure at the Center had lectured on how noise raises the blood pressure of rats within two hours. He should only be here today listening to the racket from the Russian's apartment—he would have a stroke in five minutes.

“Enough of the dark,” she said. She stepped out of the closet and heard her doorbell shrilling.

“Who is it?” she yelled, standing ten feet back from the door.

“It's only your landlady, darling, it's not a mugger. Open the door, Mrs. Goldman—we have something to talk about here.”

Bitch face
Anna thought.
I am not in the mood for this now
. She unlocked her three locks and drew the chain back. “I was just going out, Mrs. Blungman. I give a concert today. Can you make it fast?”