Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

But before he comes home, Isabelle has to fend for herself. She’s proud of how she manages to find a job, which pays the rent and the necessities, just barely, but that’s all right. Lots of people in Oakland and its neighboring city, Berkeley, live the sort of frugal life she is crafting. People make do. They tend home gardens, shop at thrift shops and co-ops, buy secondhand books, and barter services for goods. They help each other out.

Isabelle never once considers asking her parents for money. She understands without needing to have the conversation that the support would come with demands— Come back, leave Casey, play by our rules. So she waits until she knows Casey is coming home to her, until she has found a job and can pay her rent, until she can speak calmly and firmly, until her pregnancy is well advanced and she’s sure she won’t buckle, to call her father at work. He tells her mother, of course, and her mother calls and says all the things Isabelle knew she would: How could you be so stupid, Come home immediately, There’s no way you can manage by yourself, Whatever were you thinking, getting pregnant?

To the last question, Isabelle answers simply, “I wasn’t,” and hangs up.

Mrs. Hershfeld turns out to be her inadvertent guardian angel, inadvertent because her neighbor is not in the habit of being especially benevolent. Fanny Hershfeld’s preferred stance toward the world has always been a slow, simmering indignation, but as she tells Isabelle the long-running story of her estrangement from her brother, Meir, Isabelle sees a possibility.

They are in the backyard, their common space, their only meeting place, since Isabelle hasn’t accumulated enough furniture yet to invite Mrs. Hershfeld over for coffee, and Mrs. Hershfeld never invites anyone into her half of the house. It is her domain and she doesn’t want it invaded. But the backyard, that’s where she allows herself a few minutes to stop and talk.

Years ago, a long-forgotten tenant left behind a tiny, circular wrought-iron table and two lacy chairs. The white paint has chipped and blistered, but the wrought iron underneath is sturdy, and Isabelle often finds herself walking out and sitting there at the table, under the one tree in the yard, a persimmon tree, which hangs its globular orange fruit on leafless limbs from October through January. Organic holiday ornaments.

It is the week between Christmas, which Isabelle spent with Deepti and Sadhil in San Francisco, and New Year’s, and Mrs. Hershfeld is shuffling out with a wad of dripping-wet cotton support hose to hang on the clothesline. Isabelle is bundled in a heavy sweater — the sun is out but gives little warmth this far into the winter — reading The Simple Truth by Philip Levine, which had been published earlier that year. She has set herself the task of trying again to understand the poetic form, to discover what speaks so strongly to Daniel.

“You like to read. Every time I see you — here, the front porch — you’re reading.”

“It’s poetry,” Isabelle tells her, holding up the book so Mrs. Hershfeld can see the front cover.

“Ah, Levine,” the older woman says as she lowers her aging body into the other chair and gingerly straightens out her aching knees. Fanny Hershfeld reminds Isabelle of a pouter pigeon, all billowy chest and skinny, birdlike legs. Rarely has she seen her out of a housecoat — this current one is printed with a green-and-yellow pineapple pattern — and Isabelle watches as Fanny smoothes the cotton down over her naked legs.

“Do you know him?” Isabelle asks.

“I know he’s Jewish and writes about the working man. What else is there to know? He’s on our side.”

Isabelle is struck again by the dichotomy Mrs. Hershfeld insists upon. The Jews over here, everyone else over there. Gingerly she says, “I guess I never thought about the world as our side or their side.”

“That’s because you’re too young,” Fanny Hershfeld shoots back. “What year were you born?”

“Nineteen seventy-two.”

Fanny utters something that sounds like “Pssshaw,” and Isabelle is chastised, dismissed by her youth and inexperience.

“Try the thirties and the forties, when anti-Semitism grew like baker’s yeast. And the fifties, when that megalomaniac Joe McCarthy saw a Communist under every bed. People were blacklisted .” Fanny turns and stares into Isabelle’s eyes as if to burn in her message. “Jewish people. Their lives were ruined. Permanently.” And now the older woman turns away from Isabelle and stares out over the overgrown backyard. “Sometimes they even became other people.”

“You mean they changed their names?”

“I mean they changed their souls!”

“Oh.”

And a silence hangs between them. Fanny isn’t looking at Isabelle. The rough turn of her shoulder and the deliberate twist away of her head make Isabelle hesitate to say anything, but it feels like there’s a story to be told. Just as Isabelle is gathering her courage to ask, Fanny begins to talk again.

“My husband and I were both blacklisted. Why?” She shrugs. “We were clerks at city hall. Nothing important. I did real estate deeds, that kind of thing. Saul, he was in the parks and recreation division. We filed things. We helped people out when they came in. It was fine. It paid the bills, but our lives were elsewhere. What we did for a living, that was just to have our lives.”

Now she turns to look at Isabelle. This part of the story she will address head-on. “Okay, we were Communists, but so what? We weren’t going to burn down the government. We wanted fairness, that’s all, fairness for the working man, and when that paskudnyak, holding his Senate hearings and sweating and yelling and pointing his finger, accusing all sorts of people of being traitors, when he got on TV, well, we were fired and then we couldn’t get other jobs. People were afraid to hire us. We were branded. Achhh, there was so much fear.

“And what did my husband do? He blamed me. ‘You’re the one who got me into this,’ he told me. He meant the Party. ‘You’re the one who insisted.’ As if he had no will of his own.”

Fanny stops talking, lost in remembering, and Isabelle feels she has to say something. “That must have been a hard time.”

“Hard?” Fanny shrugs again. “He was a weak man, Saul Hershfeld. How did he fight back against the evil of Joe McCarthy? He found a shiksa —stupid, with two stuck-up parents — and married her.”

Mrs. Hershfeld has found her groove. She doesn’t stop talking, and as her stories evolve, it becomes clear to Isabelle that this woman doesn’t have much use for men. Each story she tells has at its root some condemnation of a man’s ill-conceived action. It is when she is talking about her brother, Meir, that Isabelle pays better attention. He took the wrong path in life: he became a capitalist, although he would never admit to it. He bought and sold things to make a profit. He skimmed and scammed and kept on making more and more money.

“But is he happy?” Mrs. Hershfeld asks, and then answers her own question. “Not on your life. So what difference does it make that he owns a block of College Avenue?”

“He does?” Isabelle is frankly impressed. College is one of the main commercial streets flowing from Oakland down through Berkeley to the university. Long stretches of it hold small and interesting shops and restaurants and fresh-produce markets and craft shops. And then there are the seedier establishments, often interspersed here and there.

“So what good does it do anybody that he keeps a tattoo parlor going and a place that sells T-shirts and some hamburger joint?”

“Bluto’s?”

“Yeah, that one.”