Anna in Chains (6 page)

Anna wobbled forward on her high heels toward the row of orange chairs, one of which contained Jack Fine. She could break an ankle from this vanity. The smell of the perfume she had sprayed on her neck was choking her. Her skirt had little gold threads woven through it which caught the ceiling lights and flashed reflections up at her to give her the symptoms she'd been warned about by Dr. Rifkin: the way it would feel when her retina detached. Her blind date was sitting rigid, clutching a battered brown Scrabble box. His tie, bright red, dotted with white anchors, was knotted so high under his chin it appeared to be cutting off his air. His face was mottled with matching red circles—probably a symptom of impending stroke. She could tell he was wearing a laundry-starched shirt to impress her. A gold tie clasp gleamed. She had a vision of him taking off his shirt; in fact, he was suddenly taking off all his clothes right in front of her. They were perhaps already married—or, if she had lowered her standards, maybe going on a cruise together. But there she was, stuck with him. His spine was sunken between the white slack muscles of his curved back. And the rest—God help her! She didn't want to
imagine
the rest of what she'd see if he took off his pants!

And in between now and the fabulous cruise—the eternity of dinners with him, his false feeth digging into steak after steak! The earliest confiding conversations: which operations he had had, which she had had, which ones he needed, which ones she needed. And the ailments yet to come for both of them! They would never run out of material.

But finally, and most terrifying, as they progressed into their future together, he would have to get it over with. “Play the piano for me, Anna,” he would ask, because, if he was any kind of gentleman, if he was decent, he'd have to recognize “her interests.” He would lean back on her couch, chivalrous, gallantly stifling his yawns while she was coerced into betraying Mozart for him!

Not a moment too soon she stopped to scrutinize a cholesterol poster: a dead cow and a happy fish. Her beloved Arthur Rubinstein had said that people who think happiness is to enjoy a good cutlet and go to bed and win at a game are stupid. “
There is nothing in it
,” he had said. “
That is not life. Life is bite into it, to take absolutely as it is
.

Jack Fine, a sailor's sappy grin hanging crooked on his face, was sweeping the field with his lighthouse eyes. His beam hit her square in the face and knocked her off course. One second more and Anna might not have escaped. Now it was merely a matter of deserting him at dockside. All right—it wasn't the most refined thing to do, but it wouldn't be such a horror. He'd sit there alone for maybe ten more minutes. By then a half-dozen dames would be closing in, complimenting the anchors on his tie.

Anna—who never once played a card game in her adult life—leaned back in one of the red metal chairs furnished for the guests of the Colby Plaza and watched her sister Ava hunched over her cards. Anna had been in Miami Beach five days already and was still at a loss to understand Ava and her friends. Furred in mink stoles and intent on their hands, they expertly slid new cards into their fans, closing and opening them like magic. What Anna couldn't understand was how these old ladies—women who'd lived through the Depression, who'd lost sons in the war (Ava's son went down over New Guinea and her youngest boy was peppered with shrapnel in France), women who'd lost a husband or two—could just sit on their behinds eight hours a day on a porch in Miami Beach and play poker!

“I'm wondering…” Anna said, “how is it that no one around here ever walks to the beach, only a block away? Where I live, in Los Angeles, you could give your right arm for a breath of air like this.”

“So why not move here?” asked one of the ladies. No one raised her head from over her cards; Anna wasn't sure if the voice belonged to Ida (whose husband, Herman, was upstairs with Alzheimer's) or Sadie (emphysema—she smoked four packs a day) or Ava's best friend, Mickey (her husband had had a fatal heart attack when he tripped on two gay boys, naked on the beach at night, a year ago).

“Why should anyone move to a morgue?”

A man's voice. At first Anna thought it came from Collins Avenue, from the sidewalk five feet in front of her chair where a trickle of old folks passed by in the deepening dusk. The women, dragged down by their diamonds and mink, promenaded, as if along a hospital corridor, on the arms of old men wearing jackets and bow ties. Anna glanced along the row of metal chairs till she made out what looked like a dark balloon floating against the pink stucco of the hotel wall. She tried to focus her eyes. Glaucoma was working its way through her retina; one of these days the sights of the world would go black on her. (Amazing, how this morning, Ava, needing to sew a button on her housecoat, threaded the needle in just one pass; eyes like an eagle and she was ninety to Anna's seventy-eight.)

“Irving bubbie, light of my life, go back upstairs or go across to the Crown and see the show but do us a favor and shut up,” said Sadie.

“Aah, they die like flies here,” Irving said. “What's the point? Tell me,” he leaned forward and addressed Anna. “What is the point of it all?”

Anna squinted, trying to see him better. She made out a pair of white suede loafers with red rubber soles, some skinny knees.

“There
is
no point,” Anna said in his direction. “You're right—it's all a big nothing.”

“Look around you,” he said. “We all come to the last stop like lemmings running to the ocean. We run to Miami Beach and play cards with our last breaths. We're dying and playing cards at the edge of the cliff till we get shoved off.”

“You're a sick man?” Anna asked.

“I have AIDS,” he said.

“AIDS?” Anna said, shocked. She shut her mouth tightly. He didn't look like the type, but you could never tell. A snort came from Ava at the card table.

“Tell her, Irving, what kind of AIDS you have.”

“You want to know?” He addressed Anna.

“Don't feel you have to talk about it,” she said, trying to breathe very shallowly.

“I'm happy to tell you. I'm able to talk very freely about this.” He paused. “I got hearing aids!”

It took a moment for Anna to digest this information. Then she felt taken. She wished fervently she were home in her dark apartment in Los Angeles where the Armenians next door choked her with their barbecue fumes. She had come on this trip to Florida to see Ava one last time before one of them died. Sisters were sisters, after all, and how much time was there? Ava already had a pacemaker and an artificial heart valve. Anna, thank God, had only the usual: arthritis, glaucoma, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, nothing serious.

Irving said, “If you don't laugh, you'll cry, take your pick.”

“Serious things like AIDS you shouldn't joke about,” Anna insisted. “Have some respect.”

“For what? I should take the world seriously? Why should I? What's the world ever given me that's any good except maybe my children?”

“And then even they don't visit,” Anna remarked strictly for his benefit only, since her daughters, when she was home in LA, called her every day.

“Not
my
children. My daughter is married to a millionaire,” Irving corrected Anna. “She sends a limousine for me every Sunday, I go to eat Chinese, Italian, whatever I want, cost is no object.”

Ava called over from the card table, “Tell the truth, Irving. Tell my sister you eat with the chauffeur, not with your daughter. When does
she
come? The last time was when you fell out of the elevator and broke your elbow.”

“Never mind. The chauffeur is like a son to me,” Irving called back. “Better than a son. Don't lose your concentration, Ava—those cardsharps over there will cheat you blind if they get one chance.”

“I'm ahead four dollars, already, Irving,” Ava informed him, “…and the night is young.” Each time, she pronounced his name “Oiving,” and Anna winced. The Bronx still lived in full color in Ava—nothing could winnow it out. The Bronx sat on Ava's tongue like a wart. Anna herself was certain she had no trace of any crude accent. She tried to speak like an American descended from someone who came over on the Mayflower.

“Listen to this one,” Irving said. “Two old men are playing golf, but their eyes are so bad they can't see where the ball lands. A third
alta cocka
comes by and says he has perfect eyesight, he'll help them out. He'll watch the ball for them. So one of them hits the ball and then asks, ‘So did you see where it landed?' The
alta cocka
says, ‘Of course I saw, I got perfect eyesight.' ‘So where is it?' the golfer says. ‘I forgot,' says the old man.”

“An Alzheimer joke! For shame!” Sadie said. “With Ida sitting right here and poor Herman upstairs, putting on his socks backwards this minute.”

Irving's attention was drawn away as a fire truck and an ambulance raced by, their sirens screaming. “What's your hurry?” Irving asked, waving his hand at them in dismissal.

Anna's eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and she watched Irving's bald head wobbling on his turkey neck. His ears were huge; they hung on his skull like some strange invention. Certain animals, when she saw them on nature programs, made her feel this way. They adapted to their environment without regard for polite shapes. She didn't want to have to look at their hanging pouches or spiky chins or poison sacs. Old people, too, grew strange parts, took on camouflaging skin pigments, adopted peculiar postures and gaits. Anna hated belonging to an indelicate species.

“Another cowboy bites the dust,” Irving said as the taillights of the ambulance disappeared. “Who knows who'll be next?”

“Comes an earthquake we'll all be gone,” Anna pronounced.

“Here we have hurricanes,” Irving told her. “At least get your catastrophes straight.”

“A flush!” Ava said with a cry of glee, laying down her cards. She swept the pile of coins in the kitty toward her.

“Believe me, you can't take it with you,” Irving predicted. “Slow down, Ava, enjoy the sights.”

“I'm done, anyway…it's time for us to go up,” Ava said. “
Wheel of Fortune
is on in five minutes.” The four ladies pushed back their chairs and stood up. Ava tapped the cards into a neat little square and set the deck down on the table. She gathered up her big pile of quarters and dropped them in the jacket of her flowered pantsuit. She adjusted her mink.

“You ladies live by the game shows,” Irving said. “But look, right here, isn't life the biggest game show of all?”

“You're giving away trips to Hawaii?” Sadie asked him. “If you're giving away free cruises, we'll stay and watch you.”

“I told you before, Sadie—you want a cruise, I'll take you on a cruise.”

“When I'm that desperate, I'll let you know.”

“I'm going upstairs now, Anna,” Ava said. “Come with me.

“Maybe I'll stay here a while. I could do without the
Wheel of Fortune
,” Anna said.

Ava shot her a look, the same kind of look she'd sent her when Anna had been flower girl at Ava's wedding in 1914 and stepped on her train, causing Ava to stumble. “Come up,” Ava demanded. “Irving sits here all night. Irving is always here. You'll see him when we come down again from nine to ten to watch the sideshow going by,” Ava assured her.

“Your sister thinks this is the army, she lives by a schedule,” Irving mumbled into the dark. Anna had noticed this was true: Ava woke at eight, ate toast dipped in coffee poured into her saucer, watched the
$25,000 Pyramid
, watched
Cardsharks
, watched the daytime
Wheel of Fortune
, came down for poker till Meals on Wheels arrived, ate lunch from Styrofoam boxes with the other ladies on the porch (a drumstick, yellow wax beans, a slice of white bread, a cup of bouillon soup and some Jell-O). After lunch, a nap, then an
I Love Lucy
rerun, then down to the porch for card playing till dinnertime, then up for dinner, then down again for cards, then up again for TV, then down again for one last blast of bus fumes on the porch. On certain days there were doctor appointments, and once a week the trip in Hyman Cohen's hotel station wagon to the Food Circus.

As Anna walked by Irving's big feet to follow Ava into the lobby, he reached out for her hand. He had the nerve to grab it and squeeze it for a couple of seconds before he let it go. She looked down into his blue eyes and saw him smiling up at her. “Laugh a little, sweetheart,” he said. “There's no good jokes six feet under.”

A strange sensation woke Anna; the room glowed blue with particles of light reflected from the shimmering signs of the Crown and the Cadillac. No air came in the lowered windows. Ava never ran the air conditioner: she said it was too noisy, but Anna knew it was the expense. Ava had always been a miser. When they had talked long distance, arranging the visit, Ava had promised Anna a room of her own “right across the hall from mine, one with its own TV,” but when Anna had arrived at the Colby Plaza, the first thing Ava said was, “I got a cot in my room for you so you wouldn't have to be all alone. It worried me, you should be all alone in a strange place.”

The cot is cheaper
, Anna thought, but then was sorry to think badly of her sister who was soon, no doubt, to depart this vale of tears. Ava lay only a foot away breathing noisily through her open mouth. The segments of her false teeth shone like some plastic toy. The room made Anna feel claustrophobic: two beds, a stove, a sink, a refrigerator, a dining table, a dresser, a TV, a recliner chair. All Ava's worldly goods were here; from her huge, human life—a husband, children, big decisions to make—to this:
Wheel of Fortune
, Meals on Wheels, poker, little tiny portions of milk frozen in margarine containers to last the week. (Anna already lived this way in LA; it wasn't news to her but to see that her powerful sister had come to this was a shock.)