Never Too Late for Love (5 page)

"He will." She said the words with finality as
she thickly buttered another piece of toast and stuffed it daintily into her
puffed face.

After two days and no word, no crawling, Sarah called Nat
at the shop.

"Well," she said, anger rising as she heard his
voice.

"Well, what?"

"What do you mean, 'Well, what?'"

"You don't know what I mean?"

"No, I don't know what you mean."

"What's going to happen? That's what I mean."

The phone was silent. She felt him searching for words. But
her anger would not contain itself. Why wasn't he crawling?

"You can go to hell," she said, slamming down the
phone, running across the hall to Mildred. She was in the bathtub, a blob of
gelatin stuffed into a white mold.

"I told him to go to hell," she cried.

"Good."

She stood there in the steaming bathroom, watching Mildred
soap her huge belly, which looked like another whole person in the tub with
her.

"Well, what happens now?" she asked, sitting on
the toilet seat, clenching and unclenching her fingers.

"How should I know?" Mildred looked up at the
ceiling, obviously annoyed at the violation of her privacy. Sarah started to
say something, but no words came out.

"I think he's gone for good," she said after a
long pause, the sense of defeat overwhelming.

"Good riddance," Mildred said, flapping water
over her flesh to remove the soap from her belly.

A week later, he came to the apartment and removed his
clothes. He must have been watching the front of the apartment house waiting
for her to leave on her daily shopping chore. He also left a brief note:
"I'll send you money every week."

That was that. Later, there were lawyers. She got custody
of the son, although he was already nearly eighteen. Nat sent her money until
the boy was twenty-one. She went to work for a furniture store in downtown Brooklyn as a bookkeeper and no longer found time to schmooze with Mildred, who got fatter
and fatter.

When the neighborhood began to change, Mildred and Sam
moved away. But by then, she had made new friends, mostly widows, divorcées
like herself, and old maids. Women alone. Occasionally, she went out with other
men, but she could no longer trust them and her suspicions as to their motives
made it impossible to develop any lasting relationship.

"You can't just keep pushing them away," her son
remonstrated.

"I should trust them? After what your father did to
me?"

"You should try, at least, to be pleasant."

"I am pleasant."

"Is it better to be lonely?"

"I'm not lonely."

If she was lonely, she would never admit it to herself. Nor
did she allow herself to have regrets, although she maintained a continuing
high level of animosity toward Nathaniel Shankowitz, which did not soften with
the passage of years.

He had remarried, her son told her, within a year after the
divorce--to whom, she supposed, was the other woman. There were twinges of jealousy
and anger at the time, but because it followed the pattern of Nat's infamy in
her mind, it only added fuel to the flames of her animosity.

She never saw him again, nor did her son ever broach the
subject, although he saw his father very briefly on rare occasions. When he did
mention him again, the son was, by then, a paunchy graying man with his own
family responsibilities, reasonably prosperous, with a liquor store in Flushing.

"Pa died last week," he said, shrugging, as he
whittled at the fat on a slab of pot roast in his mother's apartment during his
weekly Friday night visit. His wife rarely came. Sarah did not even stop
chewing, although she felt the beginnings of heartburn prompted by the sudden
revelation.

"You were at the funeral?"

"Of course."

She tried to put the idea out of her mind, but she could
not fully contain her own feeling of elation at his dying first. It wasn't
really nice to think such thoughts, she told herself, remembering, for the
first time in years, their early years together. She wondered if she should
have gone to the funeral.

By the time she became eligible for social security, the
neighborhood had changed drastically. The apartment house was completely black
and, although she found her neighbors hard-working and reasonably quiet, she
felt decidedly alien in their midst. Her friends, many of whom had already
moved out of the neighborhood to Flatbush or Queens, had already begun to leave
for Florida and it wasn't long before her son bought her a small condominium in
Sunset Village.

"You like it there, Ma?" her son would ask
whenever he called, which was increasingly rare.

"Better than Brooklyn."

"You got a lotta friends?"

"Too many. They're all a bunch of yentas." It
never occurred to her that she was a yenta as well.

Not long after she received the New Year's card from Cousin
Irma, she got a person-to-person call from Huntington, Long Island.

"I have a person-to-person call for Mrs. Nathaniel
Shankowitz from Huntington, Long Island," the impersonal voice of the
operator announced.

"I'm Mrs. Nathaniel Shankowitz," she said, a note
of tempered hysteria in her voice, as she did not know anyone in Huntington, Long Island.

"Go ahead, please," the operator said.

"Yetta?" It was a woman's voice.

"Yetta?"

"This is Molly."

"Molly?"

"Your sister Molly, Yetta. You don't know your sister,
Molly? Are you all right?"

Sarah grimaced at the phone, then began to click the button
on the receiver.

"What's that noise?" the voice asked.

"I'm not Yetta."

"But the operator said you were Mrs. Nathaniel Shankowitz."

"I am."

"And you're not Yetta?"

"No."

The confusion was obvious. The woman mumbled something
about a wrong number and the telephone connection was broken abruptly. Stupid
operators, she thought. It was an accepted axiom that all of the operators in Poinsettia Beach were dumb.

The day after the phone call, she got a letter from the
credit department of Macy's in Brooklyn. It was one of those computerized
letters, addressed to Mrs. Nathaniel Shankowitz, which carried the dire threat
of credit cancellation unless the sum of $3.48 was paid immediately.

Coming so close on the heels of the telephone call from
Molly something-or-other, the situation took on the air of a genuine, and most
annoying, mystery. She hadn't been into Macy's in years. Besides, she lived in Florida for nearly five years by then.

"The computers are going crazy," one of her
friends told her. "They got you mixed up."

But when she got a post card signed "Irving" from
Barcelona, she decided to take some action. In Sunset Village, taking action
meant going to the big main office near the clubhouse. She had never
"taken action" before and had prepared herself for intimidation by
the blue-haired lady with the big round glasses on a chain who presided over
the office.

One knew immediately upon seeing her, with her imperious
air and frown lines around the eyes, that she would be menacing behind her
fixed false-tooth smile, the quintessential image of the jew-baiting shiksa.
She was, rumor had it, the builder's secret weapon, keeping all the complainers
at bay.

"Somebody's got me mixed up," Sarah told the
woman, mustering her courage. The blue-haired woman looked at her through the
big round frames, her ice eyes expressionless, although the smile never
wavered. She said nothing, demanding, Sarah knew, further explanation by her
silence.

"I keep getting strange letters and phone calls for
Mrs. Nathaniel Shankowitz."

"Obviously some address problem," the woman
sneered. "Have you called the telephone company or the post office?"

"No."

"Well, don't you think you should?" the woman
asked, as if she were addressing a child.

"The problem is," Sarah said, ignoring the
admonishment, "I am Mrs. Nathaniel Shankowitz." She detected a sudden
brief movement of surprise in the blue-haired woman's eyes.

"Who?"

"Mrs. Nathaniel Shankowitz."

Surprise became puzzlement as her lip curled in contempt.
It was well-known that the woman felt she was in an institution where the
occupants were suffering from galloping senility.

"You're not Mrs. Nathaniel Shankowitz," the woman
said haughtily.

Sarah felt her anger rise and her knees grow weak. She
gripped the counter.

"You're telling me what I am?" Sarah asked.

"Not what. Who."

Sarah fumbled in her bag and brought out her wallet with
the Sunset Village identification and, leaning over the counter, placed it in
front of the woman's eyes.

"In black and white."

The woman hesitated, her lips wavering slightly over her
tight smile, tiny evidence of her defeat. Still silent, with a lingering look
at Mrs. Shankowitz she went to the resident card file and flicked through them,
slowly, with disdain, as if such duties were meant for lesser souls. Then she
returned with two cards in her hand.

"There are two of you," she said, as if
describing two different kinds of obscene germs. "One of you has just been
here complaining about a missing social security check."

But the idea of two had registered and Sarah stared at the
card with the strange address under her name with disbelief. "Mrs.
Nathaniel Z. Shankowitz and, in parenthesis, (Yetta)." Could it be? Could
it really be?

She felt herself grow hot, her embarrassment intense. There
should have been some ritual of victory now, some contemptuous gesture to the
blue-haired woman who had been bested, but her strength was gone and she moved,
speechless, out of the office.

Walking home, she contemplated the impending humiliation.
The two Mrs. Shankowitzes. Number one and number two. They would snicker behind
her back. "There goes number one." She would be an object of
ridicule, talked about, ridiculed, a yenta's delight. "Shush, girls,
number one is coming."

People would laugh about it at the table. Briefly, she
entertained the idea that her first assumption was wrong. But logic and old
memories intruded. They had been the only Nathaniel Z. Shankowitz in the Brooklyn directory. It was too much of a coincidence. Besides, she knew that Nat had been
living in Queens and, once, just once, she had looked up his name in the Queens directory.

There, too, it was the only Nathaniel Z. Shankowitz. She
cursed her pride now, the insistence that she be listed by her married name
with the man's name intact. It seemed such a harmless little idea, but she felt
some protection from it and in Sunset Village, especially Sunset Village. It had buttressed her pride. Her and her stupid pride. Where had it gotten her?

By the time she had returned to her apartment, she was in
tears. The mail had come and she picked it up from the floor beneath the slot.
She was too harassed to look over the envelopes and, instead, put them aside
and sat on the couch, where she stared into space for the better part of the
morning, contemplating her disastrous fate.

She had no alternative but to move now, she knew. To pick
up and find some other place to live. But as the day wore on, self-pity turned
to anger, humiliation to indignation. How dare she? She will not do it a second
time. Without proof, she had firmly decided that the second Mrs. Shankowitz was
"the other woman." Who else? It was she who should move, Sarah
decided, as her hatred took shape again and crowded out all self-pity.

It was with that sense of new-found strength that she
finally got to the mail, sometime in the late afternoon, after she had done her
household chores and checked in with her various friends. Actually, she had called
them in rotation more to feel out their knowledge than for any other specific
reason. Assured that the cat was still in the bag, she busied herself with the
affairs of her household, which included looking at the mail.

It was check day, the third day of the month. In Sunset Village, that was more like a religious holiday with the mailman being followed
around as if he were the Pied Piper. Her interest in it had been momentarily
deflected but, remembering, had prompted her to seek out the spot where she had
put the mail. The check was there, its bluish official-looking funny typescript
peering at her from the little plastic window. But the envelope below it was
exactly the same. Same name. But the address was quite different. The mailman
had simply made a mistake.

She held up the second envelope to the light. Was the
amount the same as hers? Or more? Surely more. That scheming woman surely had
found a way to squeeze more out of the government. Sitting down, she put the
envelope on the cocktail table in front of the couch and looked at it. What if
she opened it? It had the same name. She knew there was a penalty for opening
the wrong check. Hadn't she warned others about it from time to time. She was
not a fool, she thought, rejecting the idea.

But as she sat there watching the envelope, other thoughts
began to fill her mind. Suppose she simply let it sit there. Just that. Put it
under the candy dish and leave it there. Who would be the wiser? She reveled in
this sudden sense of power over the second Mrs. Shankowitz. For a change, she,
Sarah, would not be the victim. The woman deserved it. Look what she had done
to break up her marriage.

A missing social security check was one of the major
disasters, next to sickness and death, that could affect their world. It was,
of course, replaceable. But that took time, and the aggravation it caused was
more than simple inconvenience. For those who lived from day to day, it was the
fuel of life. Without it came the humiliation of borrowing from friends, or, if
pride meant more than hunger, foraging for scraps among the household
leftovers.

She slipped the check under the candy dish. Wasn't she
entitled to inflict such punishment? she asked herself, knowing that the
missing check was already causing the woman anxieties. But look what she had
done to Sarah. Considering the crime, it was hardly the punishment for
twenty-five years of loneliness and humiliation. She could be honest with
herself now. It was lonely. It was humiliating.