Other People's Lives (15 page)

Dennis would die. Maria was a very simple-minded woman; she had only simple-minded thoughts, and took comfort from the commonplace. Louise could not control her own dizziness; she felt the lights change and the table tipping, dipping. The idea of a table tipping is not an idea, but an example of concrete thinking—a serious symptom. You think every time: This is my life. But it's not. In her dizziness, Louise got up to go to the bathroom. You know only that it can change, be different. The sock was not Maria's: it belonged to a man. Dr. Vinograd, for instance, had gone from one life to another, not necessarily all on skis. Maria was crude in her perceptions of life; she understood one thing only—survival. As a young bride during the Depression and the Spanish Civil War, Rebecca had given numberless wonderful parties, had loved being a hostess. She had thought: This is my life. But it wasn't. Once, many years before, Pablo Casals, on a mountain-climbing expedition, had injured his hand. He had thought then with half-deceiving relief: I will never play the cello again. But he did. It was possible that such beliefs had left Maria without a conscience, like Frankenstein. Like Elisabeth, whose life had so changed that it was frozen now in chilly perfection. Just as facing backward on a moving bus, everything slipped away in frozen, exaggerated stillness: a world where no one moved and nothing was translatable. Dizziness was in itself a translation—and a very ordinary one: the table tipped. The woman on the bus with the two sweet-faced, dark-haired little girls had not known: it was why she looked at her lively, chattering daughters with such wonder. Once she had spoken a different language, had learned English with a British accent, never guessing then that the past and this particular present which she knew could not tell her future. You know only that it can change, be different. The sock, which was not Maria's, could have been once.

Dennis would die. Passing through the foyer, Louise looked up at the photographs and saw that these positions and stances of agony which he had worked to refine as an expression of his art were now an exact reflection of the agonized condition of his body. Which could no longer change, be different. You won't leave me yet, Matthew, will you, baby, angel? Maria, peeling an orange, knew perfectly well what had happened to her, but had an odd way of looking at history: she did not think it determined the future, sealing it up. The table tipped. It was a view that was not necessarily true, but simply just as possible.

In the bathroom, the sounds of other people's plumbing rumbled and clanged through the pipes. Soon Matthew, on his way in to brush his teeth, would stop off to stand near his mother. In his pajamas and without his glasses, he would look almost like a baby, his vulnerability extreme, his tentativeness exaggerated and poignant: set, like a photograph, for nostalgia. Chairs would scrape; Arthur, Joan, and Reba would get up slowly and, gathering their things together, begin to move toward the door—as always, reluctant to leave. A bulb in the hallway would be burnt out, Maria would leave her door open for them till she ran off to answer the phone, which might or might not be the hospital.

Louise looked in the mirror and considered the familiar evidence of her own face, which had said always: This is my life. And it was, but just like a photograph, set and bounded in one time, it could not tell her anything more than what had already happened.

I
N BOOKS, RADIATORS HUM
and sing; in my house, the radiator howls and yelps as if a baby were locked up in it, an angry baby who, though he cries and cries, still does not bring his mother running. Not that she isn't longing to. But there is an older neighbor around or an aunt maybe, and her philosophy is: He's crying? So he'll cry! And the baby in the radiator—how can he know all this? So he sends up a last, raging yowl and I am woken up.

Here, in the brief, early whitish light, the march of neighbors has already begun. For even though it is barely morning of my first day home from school, the news of a sick child has shuttled through the building like steam through the pipes, and my mother's voice rises from the kitchen in bitterness.

“What's a doctor? He sits and sits studying long enough so that finally in one place his bathrobe wears out.”

It is not a question now of tissues and aspirins, of swollen glands or a throat that won't swallow. This time it is serious: Lichtblau, the limping
Golem
with MD on his license plate, has made a housecall. Dragging one heavy foot behind the other, he has announced measles and a high fever, and in a stingy mumble as dull as the one that sends black years to the Irish kids on his new Buick in the street, he has even mentioned the possibility of hospital. But this doesn't worry me because what's a hospital? One, nurses: quick-stepping, white-clad girls whose heads are all blond and faces
shiksa-
silly. And two, doctors: bald, heavy men, sad-eyed and Jewish, who walk slowly on dragging legs, their bodies wrapped up in old maroon bathrobes, shamefully all worn away in one spot.

What would I do in a place like that? Where would I keep my glass of sweet, lukewarm tea that sits, whenever I am sick, like lightened liquid honey on a folding chair by my bed? Where would I put all my books? Where would I get my neighbor stories? As I lie back against the pillow, my room flies up before me like an airy, pastel balloon. From the window, slats of sunlight sift in, off-spinning ballerina twins to the clumsy elephant slats of the fire escape: the sun is playing a game of potsy on the linoleum. Hopping each time to a different cone of color, the sun has zoned my floor so that it's a country counter of homemade, fruit-flavored ice creams, or else great clean pails of paint from which I can choose new, sweet, custardy colors and order the painter to paint my room.

Outside, other children's feet thump off to school. Some are shouting: they just got to the corner, shoelaces dragging, and now, for spite, the light is changing. And some are crying: people with bad work habits, maybe they forgot their consent slips or their gym suits, and because it's too late now to go back, the crying buttons them into their stormcoats even tighter and their whole bodies knead with what's coming. But I am inside, I am home, and sickness is all pleasure.

“Some tremendous achievement,” my mother says, and from the kitchen her voice in anger and sourness closes in on itself till it's black, black as the telephone, a mother jungle—steamy from her tears and sour from her breath. If she listened to me, she'd be completely different, even wear nail polish, but if that's what I'm looking for, she says, what I better do is go out and get myself another mother. As it is, though, the one I have plucks pinfeathers out of a chicken, and because her fingers get clumsy and impatient instead of elegant and neat, the knife point nips them so they bleed a thin, crooked trail that maps out spongy yellow Chicken-land: a bridge across the legs, a mountain pass to the wings, and all the way back through to the interior where the tiny stomach and liver lie hiding together, breathing like brothers.

“Some tremendous achievement,” she tells Birdie. “To sit and sit and study and study and nowhere in the whole process is there a head that comes into it or a brain that's involved. In medical school the big expense is in bathrobes.”

Birdie is puffy-brown and stuffed, the awful splendor of a Florida suntan. Her voice too is bleached—thin and hard from the sun and sandy from cigarettes. With aqua earrings, an orange dress and two orange-painted big toes that pop out from aqua open-toe shoes, Birdie is herself a sunstroke.

“Let's face it, Manya,” she tells my mother. “You'll never get satisfaction. A Jewish doctor is a Jewish prince.”

A Jewish prince! Joseph Nasi, Joseph the prince…

The chamber was thick with incense and plush with silken pillows. In the distance a droning voice was chanting the name of Allah, summoning the faithful to prayer. But within the richly adorned room not even a palm frond dared stir, for in the center, seated upon the largest and most sumptuous silken pillow of them all, was the Sultan himself, brocade pantaloons loose about his legs and a gleaming scimitar at his waist. Behind him stood his fierce, mustachioed guards, before him veiled and scented dancing girls. All awaited his pleasure and command. Beneath the imperial turban, however, the Sultan's heavy brow was clouded and his darkened visage bespoke distress. Besides all this, he was very ugly, had a fat, puffy face as if mosquitoes couldn't keep away from him. With a soft rustle of silks, a graceful, veiled maiden appeared before him, bearing a silver tray of sweetmeats. But barely raising one languid hand, the Sultan sent her away. On hot days, sweetmeats probably made him a little nauseous. A richly garbed courtier bowed low before him.

“Sire,” he said, “an emissary just arrived from the mighty King of Spain urgently begs that Your Majesty receive him.” But bidding him rise, the Sultan merely looked away, saying, “I shall receive no one.” A thin, hurrying Vizier flung himself at the Sultan's feet crying, “If it please Your Majesty, a messenger stands at the palace gates with a plea of grave import from Your Majesty's heroic general now engaged with the Infidel in battle far afield.” The beetle-browed Sultan sighed.

Suddenly a great clatter was heard from without and finally even the fat, sitting Sultan started getting a little curious.

“What occasions this disturbance?” he demanded of his court.

“It is nothing, Your Majesty,” replied a saber-bristling guardsman. “Nothing His Highness need concern himself over. It is merely a Jew.”

“A
Jew?
” cried the Sultan, hastily rising from his cushions as color flooded his features. His eyes were popping, too, and probably by this time there was even a vein twitching somewhere. “A Jew?
What
Jew?”

“Merely a Jewish doctor who calls himself Joseph.”

“Joseph!” the Sultan cried out with great emotion. “All praises to Allah Who has sent him to me this day. Bring Joseph to my presence immediately.”

Hustled in between two armor-laden guardsmen was a slight, bearded man of modest dress and bearing and proud, intelligent eyes.

“Sire,” he said, stepping forward, carefully lowering his eyes, but not bowing his head or bending his knee, for there was only One to Whom Joseph bowed. And not every other minute either because he certainly wasn't Catholic.

“O Joseph,” the Sultan called out in great agitation. “What news do you bring me? What of my son, what of my ships, and what of the terrible apparition of my nightly slumbers?”

“For your son, O great Sire, I have prepared a special salve and now the lad's eye is as bright as ever it was.”

“Selim,” the Sultan breathed. That was his son's name in Turkish.

“Of your ships, Your Majesty. Though one was lost in a storm at sea, the cargo of all the fleet has been rescued in a foreign port by a friend and member of my faith, one Mannaseh ben Levi. Further, he has sent a message to me with the news of a worm, Your Majesty, who through his own cunning can spin silk. He offers to send to your court as many of such creatures as Your Majesty desires in the shipment with the lost cargo.”

“Allah be praised!”

“Of the apparition. It was a warning to Your Majesty of the storm at sea which distressed your ships. Now that the cargo is safe, the dreaded apparition will trouble you no longer.”

“O Joseph, physician to my body, my soul, and my coffers. How shall I reward you? What is it that you wish?”

“For myself, Sire, there is nothing I desire. But for my people, I ask that they may always live in peace within your walls, free to pursue their daily lives and to worship, harming no one, according to our age-old laws and beliefs.”

“Granted, Joseph. Most swiftly and easily granted. But what of yourself? What do you ask for your own person?”

“Only that which is granted for my people.”

“Then, Joseph, if you will not ask, I must bestow unrequested. And I, His Imperial Majesty the Sultan, name you, Joseph, a Prince of my Domain. No longer are you merely Joseph the Jewish doctor. Henceforward you are to be known as Joseph the Prince! Let cymbals sound and gongs strike!” Right in my ear: it is Birdie's Atlantic City charm bracelet sounding and gonging on the Formica table.

“Uh-tuh-tuh and look who's here!” she says, smiling at me, her lipsticked lips wide and bright as a sideways orange Popsicle.

Uh-tuh-tuh and look who's here. Yellow kindergarten clowns hop all over my pajamas and red spots climb through my flesh. That's who's here.

“
Ketzeleh,
” says Birdie. “Are you hungry? Do you want some bread and peanut butter?” But I'm not sure what I want; my head is spinning off in a deadman's float all by itself and is strange to the rest of me—luggy limbs and scratchy skin.

“Oh, Manya,” Birdie calls to my mother. “Watch how your daughter spreads the peanut butter. I love the way she does it—so perfect and so exact you'd think the knife is a paintbrush. Look how she sits there with that peanut butter like an artist.”

“Some artist,” my mother says. “She has no hands, she's just like me. She couldn't even tie up a goose, my father used to say about me, and that's what it is—no hands.”

In the back of the
Siddur,
in the Song of Songs, it says: What shall we do for our little sister, for she has no breasts? But there is nothing in it about no hands.

“Look how she makes it smooth and how she goes over and over it. By the time she's through, it's a shame to eat it.”

But my mother doesn't even bother to turn around because in her opinion peanut butter and nail polish are the exact same thing: both of them made up inside the head of Howdy Doody.

Birdie has nothing against peanut butter, though. Why should she? She chews gum, plays Mah-Jongg, goes to bungalow colonies and eats Chinese food. Altogether she would be a cow but for one thing—cows get the best boys and end up with the best husbands. And this is Birdie's story: she didn't. So far did she miss in this one way that even though she has been divorced for years, she still cries to my mother in the kitchen that when she wakes up in the morning she feels that there is no taste in her, and sometimes when she stands with her shopping cart in the aisle at Daitch's, everything starts to get cold, sour, and far away. Her one son, Salem, is eighteen and goes to pharmacy school in Philadelphia: by a coincidence, an accident, the city where his father lives. Really he should be named Shalom, but from being ashamed that it was too Jewish, Birdie named him Salem and what she didn't know was that he would get called Sal—a name for an ordinary Italian hood. Still, he is very good-looking, Salem: tall, black wavy hair, and a long, rocky face like Abraham Lincoln's. Every couple of months he comes home to visit his mother, and takes back all her saved-up empty soda bottles for the deposit, pulling them along University Avenue, her shopping cart behind his long, skinny Abraham Lincoln legs all the way to Daitch's. When he's not there, I don't think she bothers about soda bottles, and anyway, when her allergies come she goes to Florida, when it's too hot in the city she goes to Monticello, in between sometimes she goes to Lakewood or Atlantic City, and for what's left she comes back to the Bronx and starts right in playing Mah-Jongg as if she were just a cow with other cows, her life the same as theirs.