Peter Orner - Esther Stories

He dismisses them all from his mind and rubs the leather on the side of the door, whistles quietly. Nineteen years old and he doesn’t feel particularly old. But he doesn’t feel that young anymore either. It’s whole that he feels. More complete than yesterday. Yesterday, a day of trying on suits, shoes, ducking out of work early. Sarah’s hand rests on the seat near his knee and he reaches for her wrist but doesn’t touch it. Feet as big as his, but hands and wrists so small. Her wrists the daintiest thing about a girl not so dainty. He allows himself this moment where she can’t chastise him. “You aren’t marrying a ballerina,” she’d say if she noticed him admiring her wrists, which would mean more than the obvious. It would also mean he wasn’t marrying Bets, who used to dance ballet. Bets so light and tiny. Sometimes Leon carried her around on his palm like a waiter serving drinks. And yes, sometimes he does think about his sister-in-law’s legs, the way she leaps when she walks, the way she closes her knees together when she sits, splaying her little bird feet out, but that’s different, different.

Frieda Gottlieb tightens the shawl around her head by yanking on the ends. She stands in the front hall and looks at herself in the mirror and thinks of the ways Isadore went wrong with Sarah. The worst by far being that he took her to work with him. Let her play in the factory like a dirty-kneed Irish brat. Why did he raise her like she was a boy when he had a boy already? Grown man playing games with his daughter in a factory full of men and anybody has to ask where she went wrong? But wasn’t she a beautiful baby, all cheeks, big pouches drooping? Frieda examines her own face, not wrinkled so much as pressed in, as though her features are retreating into her head. The girl’s eighteen! Didn’t I love you, Poo? I didn’t play hide-and-seek with you and the grubby men who wanted to take you out in the field behind the factory and do unspeakables, but didn’t I love you? Frieda looks at herself, but she talks now to Isadore, whose picture, as always, lurks behind her, lording the front hall as he never did in life. Always more court jester than king, and maybe if he’d taken his own life more seriously for half a second, she wouldn’t be out there. Frieda listens to the slow creak of life as Albert begins his wake-up routine upstairs. Her late-sleeping son. So oblivious to anything that goes on in this house. Your sister’s run away for good today. Huh? What, Ma? Who’s runnin’ where? She listens to Albert in the bathroom, the pipes groaning and thwacking throughout the house, the plumbing another reminder of Isadore’s ineptitude. My daughter the slut with the little white suitcase her father gave her. Perhaps he knew how she was going to use it one day. Albert drops a glass on the bathroom floor. Yells, “Damnit! Ma!”

And she will not crawl back here no matter what monstrous else she’s carrying besides that suitcase.

Frieda looks at her face and touches her forehead as if to mark her own words. That’s what’s for certain. Banished. She can drown in her own stew out there, never here. Frieda goes to the kitchen for a broom and dustbin. Just before her face leaves the mirror, she sees those jowls, how they sagged off that beautiful child like popped balloons.

After he finds a space on Benefit Street behind the courthouse, Walt gently shakes her awake. Sarah opens her eyes slowly and realizes the car has stopped, that it’s happening. For the first time all day her eyes betray that she’s frightened. She has been since the moment she woke up and began furiously packing the suitcase, but she wasn’t foolish enough to let Walt know. She was well aware what impact her fear would have on his resolve. Walt so skittish. Puffs his chest like such a big man, but when it comes down to it, he’s scared of anything and everybody, especially her mother, who will twist her hands together for how long after this escape? Escape! As if this even resembled one. If what they were doing was escaping, they were like a couple of convicts breaking out and then stopping for coffee across the street from the prison. They weren’t forty miles from Fall River. After three nights in a hotel (of all of it, the news that they’d stayed in a hotel would torture her mother the most), they’d go home. To a little place he found on Weetamoe, the top half of a house that at least, thank God, wasn’t green. It was fading yellow, nearly white in the sun. Walt would take a risk only so far. But it made sense, didn’t it? His job. Our friends. But couldn’t we have gone and done this out of New England? So the fear in her eyes isn’t of her mother’s wrath, which can take a flying leap for all she cares. Let her yowl her head off. Let her rot in that house, with the neighbors hiding under their kitchen tables.

No, what Sarah’s afraid of is Monday afternoon, of being alone in that little furnished place on Weetamoe on Monday afternoon, of staring out the window at the corner. She sees herself watching some Italian kid jumping rope in the street. A little girl in a brown dress with big buttons that flops as she leaps. The girl, clean-faced but dirty all over, doesn’t see her, and wouldn’t think much if she had. Just another lady staring out the window like bored ladies do. But what choice do I have really? And aren’t I getting out of that house? Weetamoe’s only ten blocks up the hill from Robeson, but isn’t there a continent in those ten blocks? From her face, yes. Which is all that counts, though of course she also knows that a mother’s silent judgment reaches you wherever you are. That’d be true if she ran to Rio de Janeiro.

Walt doesn’t notice the glaze of fear in her eyes. He’s straightening his tie and tucking in his shirt as best he can while he’s still sitting in the driver’s seat.

“All right, banana,” he says. “Good sleep?”

She doesn’t say anything, just looks at him, curious at how someone can just plow along, unbogged. Not even fathoming what this is about, and it’s so obvious. Nostrils in a book his whole life, like her yeshiva-boy cousin Harry. Maybe reading shrinks Walt’s brain. She’s almost envious, and for a second she permits herself to be genuinely pleased. But she resists the urge to say something nice to him and slips on her shoes. She gets out of the car and takes in the huge red-brick courthouse, which according to Walt is famous in Providence because it dates back to the time of Roger Williams. Roger Williams, she thinks, another one who fled Massachusetts for postage-stamp Rhode Island. But at least he never got back in his canoe and went home to Monday morning. She stands on tiptoe and talks to Walt over the roof of the car.

“I wasn’t going to do this, you know.”

“Oh.” Walt lolls his head on the edge of the top of the car and watches her. He’s on the verge of smiling outright, but he’s unwilling to risk it.

“I only put my suitcase in the bushes in case I capitulated.”

He perks his head up. “So you capitulated?” Now he laughs. “Oh, Sare, I didn’t think you had it—”

“I didn’t say I did.”

“Oh.”

“I just changed my mind. You certainly didn’t convince me of anything. And you aren’t rescuing me either, so put your white horse back in the stable.”

“You’re as booby a meshuggeneh as your mother.”

She sniggers, but doesn’t say anything. Walt walks around the car and takes hold of her arms. She thrusts her head away, dramatically, like a girl in the movies who really wants to be kissed but doesn’t want to show it, except that Sarah doesn’t want to be kissed. Right now she doesn’t even want to look at him for fear that he will see what her joy looks like. Because even though she’s a little woozy now, it’s there, and it’s disgusting. Smack on her face in Rhode Island. He’ll see, and then he’ll kill himself trying to make it so she feels this way for three days straight. And God forbid longer. Which would not only be impossible, it would make her berserk. So to rid herself of joy, she imagines what’s to come. She thinks of the calculations. Hmmm, let’s see, if the baby was born in May, hmmmm, well, there’s November, December, January, February, March, hmmm…But even that’s a hell of a lot better than being invisible, and she thinks again of that girl skipping rope in the street, not even bothering to look up at the lady in the window. And she watches herself, Sarah, ram her fist through the glass to get that little snot’s attention.