Anna in the Afterlife Read online

  Abram’s younger brother, Sol, was a Valentino look-alike, always in black shoes polished to a shine, a rakish thin mustache on his face, a wink in his eye. Women loved him, women—unlike Anna—who couldn’t see through to his slyness, his crooked nature. He was dumb and shrewd at the same time, a combination Anna had no use for, a man without a vocabulary, a man who said things like “She don’t want to see me,” and never knew the difference. His stupidity gave him courage, he took chances, he got mixed up with every lowlife around and thought anyone in a striped suit was a powerful kingpin.

  Sol’s business in Cleveland involved installing claw machines in bars, diners, cafés, and dance halls. The machines required customers to put money into a slot, then aim the claw down into a pile of tantalizing gifts: leather wallets, wristwatches, china dolls, pearl earrings, rings, and necklaces. The goal was to capture a prize. When Sol brought a machine to their apartment to demonstrate it to them, Anna tried it and found that the prize fell from the claw’s grip every time.

  “It’s robbery,” she told Sol.

  He laughed.

  She tried again: the claw hand was imprecise, it was impossible to get it positioned. If she did grasp a prize, the claw went limp, its springs collapsing and allowing the object to drop back into the pile.

  “Try it this way,” Sol instructed her, and showed her how to position the claw behind the object so that—as it dropped down—it also moved forward and landed on the prize. “It’s not easy but it’s possible.”

  After he left that night (to go out with one of his bleached-blonde floozies), Anna confronted Abram. “I don’t like you mixed up in this business. It’s gambling.”

  “What’s so bad about that? Isn’t all of life a gamble?”

  Abram, the philosopher, comforted himself every day, convinced that if he wasn’t rich, it didn’t matter because “the best things in life are free.” If he didn’t own a yacht, he could still rent a rowboat in Prospect Park and go fishing. If he didn’t own an oceanfront house, he could still go out to Coney Island and sit on a bench on the boardwalk and contemplate the mystery of the sea. The ocean was his, the seagulls were his, the big tankers out on the horizon were his. The pelicans diving for fish were his.

  But they weren’t Anna’s, and she had no interest whatsoever in pelicans.

  At least they had privacy in Cleveland. Mama and Gert were not underfoot. Anna could make meals for Abram without garlic and onions, which Mama always used and which Anna hated. She wanted to prove to her husband, who had a streak of impossible Jewish piety, that if she served butter in his mashed potatoes alongside a steak, God would not strike him dead for the sin of putting meat and milk together. How could Abram, or anyone, believe those Old World tales in which God was always about to strike someone dead for some foolish act like eating bacon? What God? Where was God? Had he turned up to save her brother from drowning or her father from dying young of a sore throat? Had he stopped Anna’s mother from marrying, for her first husband, a bigamist? Why should Anna worry about what God wanted the Jews to eat?

  Sol lived in a room in a hotel in downtown Cleveland; he spent time there only when some lady friend did not have him stay over at her place or when Abram happened to forget to invite him over for dinner. Sol filled up Anna’s apartment with cigarette smoke and the scent of his shoe polish. He didn’t seem to sense her obvious distaste at everything about him; in fact, he seemed to think she was grateful for his offering Abram this chance to get rich. He’d tilt back in one of the kitchen chairs with the air of entitlement that the rich carry with them—he’d drop his cigarette ash into the dessert dish that had been filled previously with applesauce or canned peaches. He was always plotting: to buy more machines, different machines, to fill them with cheaper items, to invent new kinds of machines. He thought they could sell other things, like dirty postcards, from vending machines. He had a collection of these that he brought over one night, laying them out on the kitchen table in a fan, like a winning poker hand. While he and Abram talked business, Anna, pretending not to look, peered over their shoulders as she cleaned up the dishes. Her eyes were riveted on these women: young women, with delicate faces and tendrils of curly dark hair framing their graceful features—but naked! Posed with a single rose in her hand, or her toe held forward, about to step into a marble tub, or with a feathery shawl resting on her shoulder, each woman looked as if she belonged in a poem or a Shakespeare play, each having a radiance and sweetness about her form.

  Anna could not understand how they would pose for a camera this way, to know that their private parts would be slavered over by men like Sol, to know their images would be sold and bartered from pocket to pocket. Why was she here serving lamb chops and string beans and applesauce to a man who was trying to convince her husband to sell pictures of naked women in coin machines? What did Sol think when he looked at Anna in her linen skirt and wool sweater? What did Abram think when he studied these women? Did he wish his wife were one of them?

  She knew Abram wanted her to have more feeling, but Anna was convinced she had been born with something missing: she had no animal instincts. She didn’t sweat. She didn’t like food (meat with its gristle, eggs with their slime, milk that turned sour in the bottle). And she didn’t like the mess and grunting of sex, the untidiness of it, the invasiveness of it. She knew she had to put up with it, she knew it came with the wedding ring, but could other women really enjoy it?

  Gert, ever the thorn in her side, actually said to Anna’s daughters one day, in her old age, “Your mother thinks her shit doesn’t stink.” Anna was shocked by this, truly disgusted, horrified, to see so frankly revealed the pit of slime in which her sister’s mind swam. The irony was, in fact, that Anna’s bowels—all her life—were literally knotted in slime, an “irritable bowel,” the doctors told her (they always asked her if she was especially worried or tense about anything!). What she never told them was that her father had been fanatic about bowels all his life. He asked Anna and Gert daily if they’d had their bowel movements. Anna refused to discuss this with him. Therefore, because she wouldn’t answer him, he forced cod liver oil into her mouth—a disgusting, fishy, spoonful of poison! My God, Anna thought, now that life was all over for her, if only she had been able to live it like an angel: unsweaty, unfed, unboweled, unsexed.

  Soon after they got back to Brooklyn, soon after Abram installed dozens of claw machines in bars and dance halls and cigar stores in Brooklyn, Governor Dewey declared gambling machines illegal and ordered that they all be thrown in the East River.

  Abram’s scheme to get rich and buy Anna the privacy she craved never came to pass. At least he did this one thing: when they moved back into the bedroom next to Mama’s in the house in Brooklyn, Abram screwed a lock and bolt on their bedroom door. Time and time again he tried to lead her into the desert of the mysteries. He whispered imaginary tales to her, he told her to pretend she was someone else, a fan dancer, a veiled beauty in a harem, he urged her to forget herself. He would be a sultan, she a belly dancer in his harem. He would be King Herod and she would be Salome. She would do the dance of the seven veils to delight him. But the bolt on the door never stopped Mama from knocking and asking for laundry, and though once or twice Anna tried to imagine herself Salome, and once or twice the mistress of Chopin, she never achieved the key to the secrets found in the desert of the mysteries.

  Anna Gets Wings

  TODAY ANNA was to disappear permanently from the face of the earth. “The sun shall not smite me by day nor the moon by night,” she reminded herself. “Six feet under.” “I’m goin’ where the sun don’t shine.” “Kicking the bucket.” “Dead and buried.” “Cold as a corpse.” “Dead as a doornail.” “Cashed in my chips.” “Bought the farm.” “Gave up the ghost.”

  Heir now to these literary gems, Anna was impressed. Dying brought a person into the realm of poetry and eternity, of eulogy and flattery. The bad news, however, was that she’d be silenced for good, her lips buttoned for time immemor
ial, till death she did part, which was, after all these years of living and fearing and fighting, today.

  No more limericks, jingles, complaint letters, no etudes, gigues or nocturnes, no chocolate cakes on her birthday, no flashing of her pretty legs, no pencil and pad at her fingertips, the end of all further opportunities to have her say! What if she turned out to be awake in her grave for the rest of eternity? Stuck there without even a crossword puzzle! She hoped her daughters had ordered a bell installed in her coffin, one with a wire going up to the outside should Anna, by some chance, come back to life.

  She had long ago dreamed that her husband Abram had been cured of his leukemia by embalming fluid, but since they had cut out his heart for the autopsy, he was prevented from rising up from his casket. Luckily, no doctors had asked her children if they could cut Anna into pieces. She was probably too poor an example of anything anatomical, too dried up, empty, her bones a latticework of splinters, to be of use to medical research. She hadn’t wanted her organs reused either, though do-gooders were always urging people to give their eyes, their kidneys, their gall bladders, to others. Did she want some stranger peeing out of her kidneys, seeing out of her eyeballs? She didn’t think so. Besides, her organs were at death’s door, like the rest of her, and of no use to anyone.

  Out in the living world, all her kin were busy. Janet was answering phone calls from dozens of people (most of them interested in financial gain now that they’d seen the two printed lines in the obituary column—Anna’s name, her date of death, and “Proprietor, Goldman’s Antiques”). The vultures—some of them dealers Anna used to do business with when she had the store—were calling to ask Janet, with voices full of insincere piety: “Did it take your mother long to die, did she suffer, was she in pain, poor thing, and what happened to the antiques left over from the store, do you want to sell them?”

  Sitting at her kitchen table, Carol was on the line with FedCo, asking the price of cold-cut platters. (She could have called Canter’s—the only decent Jewish deli in Los Angeles—but it was too expensive.) “Nothing but the best” was not a phrase Anna had taught her children to live by. Now she was feeling the consequences of her philosophy—she’d have third rate corned beef at her funeral reception, seedless Christian rye bread and prune Danish made with lard, with not a single salty black olive or a plate of pickled herring in sour cream on the table.

  She’d warned her girls numerous times that she didn’t want any transients at her funeral, no flowery baloney in the newspaper (“adored wife, beloved mother, devoted daughter, cherished sister…”), wanted no strangers who would cry crocodile tears and stuff themselves with food pretending they were brokenhearted Anna was dead. Most of all she didn’t want a rabbi who had never laid eyes on her announcing in stentorian tones how good she had been in her life and how generous to everyone in need, that she was famous for her mitzvahs—visiting the sick, honoring her parents, donating to charity, and doing a good deed a day.

  What if there were someone at the gates of heaven (what if there were a heaven!) asking Anna how many times she had succored the sick? She had been sicker for longer than anyone she’d ever heard of and had she been succored? Why did people even pretend it was in human nature to help others? Religion just tried to scare you into it. Anna had never been one to respond to threats. If anything, they made her more stubborn and ill-tempered. But now that she was up at the wire, crossing it, in fact, she wondered: should she have been kinder? And to whom?

  If there were no atheists in foxholes, were there atheists in morgues? Anna knew that once underground her pretty legs would be consumed. “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, they crawl in your stomach and out of your mouth.” She’d sung the song in the childhood alleys of the East Side of New York. “So give me God,” she challenged the universe. “Give me heaven. Give me an afterlife where I get to dance with Abram till dawn, and after that I’ll cook him sunny-side-up eggs, bubbling in the pan and sparkling with crystals of kosher salt.” At least Jews cooked with salt that tasted like salt. Jews had taste, and Anna, a Jew in spite of it all, had excellent taste; she always knew which side was up. But now she was going down, six feet under. She felt—beneath her indignation, her outrage, her certainty—a chilling shudder of fear.

  The morgue—refrigerator and dressing room combined—was not as lugubrious a place as she had imagined. Two Russian immigrant women were doing the dressing of the dead, babbling to one another in their shrill tongue, and slitting everyone’s clothing down the back. They used a giant tailor’s shears, like the one Anna’s father had owned. The dead weren’t cooperative, their elbows did not bend, so the women dressed them as if they were wooden dolls without joints.

  Anna winced when they slashed her quilted red bathrobe down the middle of the back—a waste of a perfectly good piece of cloth. They chattered over her face, packing cotton behind her lips and stitching them closed in an extremely unnatural position. Though she no longer felt any of her body parts, she was offended to have her lips redesigned as if she were whistling, which she had never done in her life, believing that a whistle was a crude way to render music of any kind. Now she was especially glad she had demanded a closed casket, unlike her sister Gert, who had so much vanity she wanted to be on display in her evening gown. (Though this would not happen for some time, apparently, which fact annoyed Anna.)

  Though Anna had none of the famed powers of ghosts, she would still have done her best to knock the lipstick out of the Russian’s hand had the lady dared to try to color Anna’s lips. When a person was dead she ought to look like death.

  Now between the two of them (were they washerwomen or brain surgeons, you never knew with these Russian women) they maneuvered Anna’s remains (she could have been a dead horse for all the respect they paid her) into the cheapest casket offered by the cemetery, a cloth-covered carton, the match to one Abram had been buried in thirty-two years ago. She didn’t even want to imagine what was left of him now. She’d seen a movie with Sean Connery who takes a young girl (his mistress as well as his niece) to the Alps ostensibly to climb mountains with her. The villagers discover, on their climb, the body of a young man lost in a climbing accident many years ago and frozen in the ice. When they bring the man back to the village, his fiancée, now a crone as old as Anna, bends over his frost-covered body and sees his beautiful, youthful face gleaming up at her through the ice crystals. That’s how Abram lived in Anna’s mind, not at the age he died, fifty-six, which was young enough, but long before that, the face with which he courted her, with his wavy hair parted in the middle, and his sweet smile that melted her resistant heart.

  A body in a box was what she had come to. She’d seen this before with her father and her mother and her husband, and the end result of a life always violated her trust in any goodness in the world. To think that even babies someday would come to this outrage! No matter what had gone on before, how glorious and successful the life, how much beauty and love and happiness had been the lot of the liver, there was the moment of the box, the closed box sitting on a pedestal, motionless as a mountain. And inside, a human being with the lid down over her face and darkness within. A fancy way to dispose of garbage.

  Even though Anna wasn’t really in there, it took her breath away to think she might be. Her children didn’t know the truth and imagined their mother was in the box. Her granddaughters were clinging to one another in the anteroom of the chapel, refusing to look upon her face in the moment the casket had to be opened for reasons of identification.

  “Forgive me but it’s required,” said the cemetery representative (an old man with a paunch in a dark suit), “—we must ask that the family certify that this is their deceased in the casket.”

  “Who else would it be?” Janet said. She, with Danny beside her, and Carol holding her hand, approached the box. Her daughters’ expressions reminded Anna of when she had taken them—as young children—into the “Hall of Horrors” in the fun house in Coney Island. There they encountered a fl
oor covered with wet spaghetti, spiderwebs brushing their faces, bats swooping down from the eaves, and skeletons popping out of the wall on springs. “It’s all make-believe,” Anna had explained to them, and she wished she could say it now. All for effect, she wanted to assure them. Nothing’s going on here—it all ended back there in the nursing home room when I stopped breathing. That was the happy end. Believe me.

  “Yes, that’s our mother,” Janet told the man in the dark suit. She reached inside the box and touched Anna’s bony fingers resting on the quilted cloth of the red bathrobe. She knew her daughter would wince—this was not a humane entertainment. Anna herself had touched Abram’s dead face in the coffin (a face made rosy with suntan colored liquid makeup) and to this day could feel the cold, clay chill on her fingertips.

  Janet leaned over and put a book of music in the coffin—Anna’s tattered book of Chopin nocturnes—as well as a sheet of paper with directions to Janet’s house for the gathering after the funeral. Then she signed the paper the man held forth, after which he decorously replaced the lid over Anna’s face putting forever out of sight that sewn-together mouth.

  The family was offered the choice of sitting in the veiled area, out of sight of the mourners, or in the front row of the chapel.

  “We’ll sit with the others,” Janet said, “but first I have to do something…” She reached into a paper bag and withdrew from it Anna’s beloved musicians—the plastic busts of Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Chopin (he was in alabaster, from Italy)—and even Bach, though Anna could take him or leave him, and lined them up at intervals on the lid of Anna’s coffin.