Peter Orner - Esther Stories

SARAH GOTTLIEB leans against the passenger-side door of Walt Kaplan’s borrowed Ford Victoria. It’s a shutterthwacking Thursday morning in November 1938. Walt, clean-shaved, bandy-legged, stands on the sidewalk facing her, still not saying anything. So quiet now the only sound is the wind and the clack of the leaves somersaulting across bricks. Sarah is hefty, round-faced, and strong — mocking him with deviled eyes, tapping the toe of her high-heeled shoe on the running board of the car like a miniature hammer, her calf working, working. He’s also chubby, closer to all-out fat than she is; he makes a face when he sucks in his belly so that he can button his pants. Now he’s spreading his arms wide to form a huge bewildered Why? But still not speaking. Her face isn’t budging, so what’s the use of fighting back, of talking at her deaf ears. He grinds his teeth and involuntarily begs her name, mouths soundlessly, “Sarah.” She doesn’t bother to shake her head and certainly doesn’t need to use her voice to say no again. Her face: Never, never, never, never, never. What do I care? Plead all day. It’s still never, till hell freezes over and the goblins go ice-skating. Walt turns and looks at the pea-green house, sees the mother in the front window glaring. Which is worse, that ancient scowler or this hyena? Same face as the one in the window, only thicker and rosier. He wonders how a little flesh can make such a difference. That one in the window so far from beautiful he’d have to be chained and dragged to do the things that with this one he re-enacts in his head nightly, daily, afternoonly. He looks back at Sarah, who is now twirling a silver necklace around her pinkie. How could it have turned into this? She knows what we need to do. The paperwork’s filed. And didn’t she say three days ago that if she had to live in that putrid house another day she’d hang herself by the flagpole in front of Durfee High? Now he’s ready, everything’s ready, and here she is all done up and beautiful, lipstick and that hat, and all he can do is look daftly from her mouth to her knees, fat little knees he could eat without mustard. Because now it’s an unbudgeable no. Though it’s no more than twenty degrees, he’s sweating already in his new wool suit. Hasn’t opened his trap since he pulled the car up to the house and already sweating like his undershirted father ranting around the store. Except he’s here in broad daylight, on the sidewalk, pleading like the ignoramus she’s convinced him he is. Sarah continues to tap her feet, her little doomsday clock ticking, ticking, sucking up his courage by the gallon. And there’s nothing to say that he hasn’t begged for with his eyes already. That if she wants to run, he’ll run. That he’s got a car. (Yes, it’s his brother Leon’s, but at least till Sunday night it’s his.) Enough cash for the moment. A car and enough money. What else is there in this country? It’s never been a question of going very far. He has a decent job, and though the mother’s a witch, there are too many others in the family, too many friends; they can’t leave for good. Simply going away for a few days to make it all legal. But that feverish tap-tap-tapping, that face taunting him. He feels the mother’s eyes on the back of his head. Surrounded. Ambushed by women. Goddamnit, does he love this Sarah down to her shoes. God forgive him for wishing the mother a corpse already.

“Sare,” he says, though he hadn’t meant to. He’d meant to rehearse the final assault in his mind first, to get the sound right, somewhere in the gray between a bullyrag and a threat. But instead he only blurts, forcelessly, his voice octaves higher than he’s ever heard it, “Sare—”

Only then it comes:

“Awright already.”

Her voice, too, from somewhere other than her eyes and mouth, as though her throat rebelled before it could be hushed. A squeaked “Sare” answered by an irritated, but at the same time simple, unequivocal “Awright already.” Have ever more glorious words been spoken by a woman? That evil crone in the house must notice something in the way Walt’s shoulders go from clenched to juggly loose, because the next moment she’s kicking open the front door and shrieking. Sarah very nearly doesn’t have time to retrieve the little Samsonite she’s hidden in the bushes beside the house. What the mother screams at them, who knows amid the slamming doors and the flush of the Ford’s V-8? And their hyperventilating laughter, like two suddenly different people hurtling into that car. By the time the tiny shawled bundle of rage reaches the curb, Sarah and Walt are already sailing across Highland Avenue. To freedom, their first shared thought, as the car lunges forward, blurring houses, lawns, garages, a man raking leaves.

Left alone in front of the pea-green house, Frieda Gottlieb shouts at her staring neighbors, the frightened Portuguese housewives peering sneakily out their kitchen windows. Forever convinced that still, after generations, not one of the encroachers knows a single word of English, Frieda barks, like the schoolteacher she was a thousand years ago, “My daughter equals whore.” She snarls, “Daughter, whore. In English they mean the same thing.”

In the car they head toward Providence, Rhode Island, where the laws are easier. So long as you got a signed letter of consent from the marriageable woman to the court three days prior to the date of the proposed marriage, you could get a license in the morning, matrimony by afternoon. It was practically a money-back guarantee. You paid a little more than in Massachusetts, but the speed made up for that. Sarah’s practically asleep by the time they reach Tiverton. Her mouth is open and she’s breathing loudly, boisterously. Thirty-six miles from Fall River to Providence overland. Tiverton to Providence eighteen miles. Nine-thirty now. License by 11:00, married before 3:00 if the line’s not too long. In Rhode Island justices of the peace get paid by the marriage was what he’d heard, so they get you out of there with no dilly and no dally. After that, dinner at the Fore and Aft in Bristol. Then back to Providence to the Wachman Hotel, where Artie Shaw always stays when he’s in town. And then Arrivederci, nature! He swoops a breath. Hasta luego, woods by the Watuppa! Ciao, blankets and trees! A bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed. A gust jolts them and the car swoons. Sarah opens her eyes and murmurs, “Stop kidnapping me, Walt. You have no right to kidnap.” He watches her pull her heels off and plop her feet, feet as big as his, on the dash. She yawns and droops her head again.

He thinks, The only bad thing about this is the secrecy. Of course he’d told Leon everything. In order to get the car and the days off from the store, he’d had to. This meant that Bets knew everything, too. But both Leon and Bets knew they weren’t to let anything out until Walt and Sarah got back from Rhode Island legitimate. Which meant the same thing in Massachusetts as it did in Rhode Island, because of the full faith and credit clause of the United States Constitution. Since he was going to have a wife instead of college, he was going to have to teach himself things. A marriage in Rhode Island’s a marriage in Massachusetts, and so on and so forth. But more important than the paper they’d bring home was getting the green light from Sarah to tell everybody. This was her show — she was the one with the mother. The Kaplans, upstarts, were supposed to feel lucky Sarah was allowing Walt into their fold, who cared how. Because Frieda Gottlieb, of course, was a different kettle of fish; her money was older. She had a lot less of it, but that didn’t matter. She might be locked away in that horrible green house in a neighborhood already gone to pot, but goddamnit it, her money was older, two generations older. The whole family, even the gang of pucker-faced cousins who talked like they were from England, make Walt squirm. And that Albert, always singing to himself, growing a full mustache at fifteen — even her little brother makes him nervous. The only one he likes is the dead father in the front hall picture, the one they all still talk to, good morning and good night, as if he’s still among the living. But that mother…a snake with hair and legs.