Celia Abrams stood in the middle of the room with her hand over her mouth. “God in heaven,” she said to herself, “what is a person? What is it that he is?”
She shut her eyes against the disorder and pulled at her hair. There was no place to sit down. Dishes were on every chair. Bedding and curtains were heaped on the kitchen table. The closets were emptied onto the beds and there were boxes still to take out of the corners, from behind the piano, from under the beds. Fifty years of living were strewn around her feet.
The buyers came in a steady dribble all day. They offered fifty cents for her ironing board and a dollar for her bed. They did not care for her dishes or her piano or her leather-covered rocker. Some looked for a television set. Others wanted picture frames. A woman came hunting for Wedgwood china.
“How should I know what china I have? Three sets dishes from my wedding and from the movies my girls collected and a few pieces from my brother. Look over and see.” The woman wouldn’t even look. She walked out without a word.
“Go and let me think,” Celia said as the door shut. She felt as if she were on the verge of understanding. One more thought and she would know. What? She wasn’t sure. Six weeks had gone by like a ride on the steeplechase tornado. She had not yet recovered her balance.
Celia opened the last box in the closet and found gowns from all the weddings she had attended. Her own wedding dress was at the bottom, wrapped in yellowed tissue paper that was falling to pieces. The embroidery was stiff and the beads were crumbling, but she didn’t cry. She had cried out all her tears, even the ones she didn’t know were in her.
The first two weeks after Morris had gone she lived in a stony silence. Friends and family came to console her but she accepted no condolences. Everyone knew that she had had forty years of poverty and quarreling. There was nothing to say. Yet she found it hard to believe that there would be no more anger between them. It was as if they had argued and he had gone out for a walk. When they quarreled, he would not eat and she would not talk. He would taunt her while she ate his supper as well as her own. “Eat,” he would say, “eat yourself into an early grave.”
Celia waited until her children went back to their work and the relatives stopped coming. It was on a Friday that she looked at the clock and it was the exact time it had been the night she found him bent over the sewing machine in the store downstairs. Anguish came in like a tide. It was as if she were drowning.
The children and the relatives came back and a doctor brought sedatives. During that week when she scarcely knew whether she was alive or dead, everything was settled. The store was sold. The apartment was put up for rent and the furniture for sale. Her youngest daughter would take her. She would live in the country in a white-shingled house, surrounded by trees and flowers. She had never been there, but a relative had brought a report.
“I sat there on the porch,” she said, “and listened to the birds twittering. And I said to myself, I must be dead. Otherwise how would I come to the Garden of Eden?”
“Twittering birds I can live without,” Celia said. “It’s my daughter Marilyn I have to live with. I’m afraid of her. I don’t know what’s in her mind. I don’t know what to say to her. It’s God’s truth. I’m her mother, but I don’t know her.”
After the commotion at the cemetery, Celia was even more frightened than before. No one had known what to do or say. Morris Abrams had been a belligerent atheist. Marilyn, however, stopped the pallbearers with a shriek. “Say something! Say something for my father,” she screamed. She ran wildly through the cemetery till she found an old gray-beard at the gates. Everyone had to wait while she gave him her father’s name and the name of his father and the names of his children so that the Hebrew words could be said. Morris’s sister was furious. “It’s just what he hated, just what he didn’t want. What are they but actors and thieves full of blessings and hocus-pocus.”
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All their words rang in Celia’s head as she unearthed a box of old bathing suits, her son’s tennis racquet and ice skates, and her youngest daughter’s baby clothes. Her memories were as unrelated as the things in her hands.
“I wanted to help him,” Celia told herself. “That was all I wanted.” As she said it something became clear. She had tried to save him from poverty and loneliness, but poverty didn’t bother him and he liked to be alone. He had tried to save her too. He was always reading to her. “Look what goes on in the world,” he used to say. “Don’t be like the other beasts who sleep and eat and eat and sleep. See what goes on before your eyes!”
“Do me a favor and don’t make me over,” she would say. “I’m satisfied to be a beast. It costs you dear?”
Yet when his sister argued with her, he always took his wife’s side. Celia tried to remember when it was that her sister-in-law had shouted, “Why do I waste my time talking to an illiterate fool?”
He told her to go and laughed at Celia. “An illiterate, my dear wife, is a person who cannot read. Since you can’t read you can’t keep it a secret forever. But if you aren’t a fool then you will shut your ears when my sister talks. She hasn’t said two sensible words in ten years.”
In retrospect, his words seemed gentle, but at the moment she had turned on him. “Shut my ears,” she said, “and sew up my mouth and close my eyes. Then your educated sister with her three diplomas and her Bolshevik papers can talk all she wants.”
Celia wondered whether he knew that she would have given an eye for one of those diplomas. Could his sister have known how many times she tried to go to school? In each school it was the same. All day she worked like two horses. When she sat down in a class at night her eyes began to close and her head grew heavy. She told her friend, the Tante, all about it many times and the Tante sympathized. She had known the same feelings.
“All day I have the strength of iron,” Celia said. “But God forbid I should sit down. Sitting down I’m not worth two cents.”
It was not as if she had given up. Only a year ago she had bribed a little girl with cookies and candy, hoping that she could teach her. Susie was in the first grade. She came into the shop to show Celia her first book.
“See,” she said arrogantly, “I can read.”
After she read all the words she knew, Celia said playfully, “Teach me the words. Teach me the words and I’ll give you an ice cream.”
For a week the little girl came to “play school” with her. Celia knitted her brows and mimicked Susie. “Alice and Jerry. Alice and Jerry have a pet pony. Alice lives in a house. Jerry lives in a house. . . .” Susie covered the pictures with her hand and Celia guessed the words. But on Friday, when they came to page nine, Celia found she could not remember page one. On Monday Celia said sharply, “Go home to your mother, I have no time.”
“What hurts me,” Celia told the Tante while they sipped tea together, “is that Morris has anything you would want in his head. You need figuring? He can figure. You want to know what goes on in the world? He knows. You want languages or philosophy? He’s there waiting. When Marilyn was home, the two of them could sit and talk two hours and I couldn’t understand one word. What is there to talk that I shouldn’t know what it is?”
“It’s the same with my boys,” the Tante said comfortingly. “Do you think I understand when they talk to each other. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe they’re talking English.”
“With the same brains, couldn’t he figure the rent or the grocery? I hear he tells a friend they should change the laws the world should get better. But he never looks in my face to see if I’m laughing or crying. And he couldn’t change himself from here to there. You know him! If somebody sits down in his chair, there could be ten empty chairs in the house and he has no place to sit. What can I do with him? They leave a hem for him to make. He asks a dollar. They leave fifty cents. He takes it! Doesn’t say a word. Is this a man?”
The Tante, a true friend and comforter, shook her head agreeably. “He’s been this way sixty-four years. You can’t do anything now.”
“Oh, if I only had the head for it and the education, I would know what to do,” Celia assured her. “I wouldn’t bury my head in a book or a newspaper. I would open a little business for myself. I would fill my pockets and I wouldn’t be ashamed. With money you can live. Without it you drag yourself along. You look like nothing. You are nothing.”
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A Puerto Rican couple felt her bed and opened the dresser drawers and shook their heads as they turned to go.
“It’s not even good enough for them,” Celia said bitterly. She put her coat over her shoulders and went down to the drug store to call her eldest daughter.
“Sarah darling, please take some things,” she begged. “I can’t stand it any more. They’ll never buy it all and I can’t stay here and sell my life away. Take something!”
“I have everything I need, Mama,” Sarah said. “I have no room for old things.”
“Then take a little thing for a remembrance.”
“Mama, I don’t want a remembrance. I have my own life. I don’t need remembrances.”
“I’m sorry,” Celia apologized. “I only mean the best for you.”
Sarah called the dealer for her. The truck came on Friday morning with two strong red-faced men whose indifference terrified her. She watched them lift the sagging couch on experienced shoulders. The lamps were carried off casually as if they were umbrellas. The rocker in which she had nursed her children was upside down on the sidewalk. Celia walked nervously from window to window, cracking her knuckles while they took the pictures and mirrors off the walls. The rug that she had washed in ammonia twice a year and wrapped in camphor for thirty summers was dragged down the steps like a rag.
“Look what you’re doing!” she shouted. “Are you crazy?” But they didn’t hear.
She was panic-stricken. She was sure they wouldn’t pay. They would fill the truck and drive off. She didn’t know who they were. How could she chase them? But she would stand in front of the truck, they would have to run her over before they could leave. She began pulling old shopping bags from the cupboard next to the sink where she kept her store of bottles, jars, and pieces of string. She ran from room to room picking up a chipped ash tray, a picture, a battered frying pan. When three bags were filled, she hid them in an empty closet. Then she went down and waited beside the truck.
“That’s it, grandma,” the driver said. He counted the money and put it into her hand. “Sign here, please.”
She stuffed the bills into her apron pocket and signed her name, slowly, carefully, in the German script her father had taught her when she was a child. Her eyes filled as the truck disappeared down the street, but she knew that the women were all at their windows, watching. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. How they would like to tell their husbands, “Abrams is gone and did she cry.” Instead Celia turned to a toothless, deaf old crone who sat on a box in front of the house all day. “I feel,” she said, “like I was coming to America. I came with a pillow and two shopping bags and that’s all I have left today.”
The old one grinned and shook her head, delighted that someone spoke to her.
“I tell you,” Celia said bitterly, “a man of straw is better than no man at all.”
The Tante came out of her fruit market, next door, in time to overhear. She wiped her hands on her apron and said “You’re correct, my dear friend, absolutely, a hundred per cent correct. When your partner’s gone, you know what I’ve struggled for twenty years. It’s a terrible thing to run a business alone. You did right. You’ll never be sorry.”
“Sorry? I’m sorry already. You know where I’m going? That’s how much I know.”
“Don’t be foolish,” her friend chided. “May my best friends have no worse. A son-in-law a doctor with a beautiful big house, and children good as gold. You’ll live like a queen. Listen, any time you want to come and live in a hole, come here to me. I’ll rent you my daughter’s room. Go in good health and don’t worry!”
Celia looked sadly at the little shop, hidden behind the sign “Will Open Under New Management, May 20.” She knew where every variety of button, snap, and lining was stored. She knew the prices that were never marked, the sizes of thimbles, shields, and welting. The young man who bought it would not believe that she had never taken inventory.
“Someone asks me for something and I don’t have it, I buy a few,” she said. “We made a living from this store for thirty years. We sent a girl to college. We didn’t have big eyes, but we always had enough to eat.”
His smart young wife turned up her nose. “I never in my life saw such a pile of junk.” She spoke of fluorescent lights and new counters. She would not consider it without new flooring and Venetian blinds.
The thought of it made Celia burn. “Money poured down the drain,” she told the old crone when her friend went to take care of her customers. “I gave everything away to those young smart-alecks. I gave it away for nothing like a crazy woman. Abrams was my eyes. Without him, every piece of paper is the same. It’s worse than blindness. It’s better to be an eight-year-old child who can read a street sign and know what subway he’s crawled on to. That’s why I sold the store. That’s my only reason. I need to be a queen in my daughter’s house? I should better be a scrubwoman in my own house. Suddenly you don’t wake up a queen. You have to be born to it. Alone, your soul’s your own. That’s what I believe!”
The old one looked ahead vacantly. Celia shook her head. “I’m blind and you’re deaf. We’re a pair.”
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Celia’s eldest daughter and son both begged her to spend the night with them until Marilyn came for her in the morning. She was stubborn. She borrowed a chair and an old army cot and spent her last night in the apartment. She woke with a start at half-past five. She had been dreaming that she was waiting at Castle Garden, resting her head on a burlap sack. She was twelve years old and alone. While she waited Morris ran past her. A mob of people were chasing him. She found a stick and beat them off.
Celia was trembling when she sat up, clutching the wooden support she had pulled out of the army cot. Her cheek was sore from the rough cotton. She could not remember where she was. The apartment was unrecognizable without furniture.
At seven-thirty, however, Celia sat at the window in her slip and sipped a glass of hot water, in which she dropped a quarter of a lemon. People were hurrying to the subway. Cars were going by. It gave her a feeling of accomplishment to see them go by. She noticed the clothes the people wore; the new hair colors and styles. The contents of the refrigerator were on the window sills. She carefully finished the left-over cottage cheese, a cucumber, and a hard-boiled egg.
At nine, she was ready in her winter hat and leather gloves. She wore her best dress and carried a pocketbook new and unused for six years. She carried her bags and boxes down, one by one. The suitcase was tied with twine. Most of her clothes and the family album were in a heavy corrugated carton that took an hour to tie. She stood in the doorway and waited.
Marilyn double-parked the car and ran out to her. They embraced quickly.
“Thank God, you’re here,” Celia said. “If I had a penny for every foolish thought that comes in my head, I’d be a millionaire.”
“I thought Phil or Sarah would come to help you,” Marilyn said.
“Who needs them? I can’t help myself?” Celia said peevishly. Marilyn opened the trunk and together they struggled with the boxes.
“Just one favor,” Celia begged. “I promised I would leave an address in the fruit store. She’s my best friend in the whole neighborhood.”
Marilyn left her address at the store. The Tante embraced her and wished her well. “Your mother is a wonderful woman. May she have what I wish her! Let me give you a few grapes for the way. She loves the purple grapes. Crazy for them!”
Marilyn worried about the car while the Tante carefully pulled off the bruised grapes. “I was here first,” a customer grumbled. “How long do I have to wait?”
“I’m sorry,” Marilyn apologized. “I’m not a customer.”
“Business first and pleasure later! Give me some apples they would have a taste. I pay fifteen cents a pound for apples and they taste like potatoes, like raw potatoes. What’s the matter with everything?”
The Tante pretended not to listen, but finally she turned and said, “Nothing’s the matter. May I drop dead this minute if you can get better apples. When is the season for apples? Ask this lady here, a doctor’s wife lives in the country. Ask her when apples come.”
Marilyn looked out impatiently. “Tell her, darling,” the Tante begged.
“In September,” Marilyn said wearily.
“So what did I say? September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, and May. What taste can they have nine months later? You’re lucky they kept the worms away so long.”
“I have to go,” Marilyn said as she reached for the bag.
“Go in good health and come in good health and write me a postcard. Tell me how she is. I love her. I love that woman.”
Marilyn ran to the car while the arguing continued. “I’m not a farmer and I’m not interested in the seasons. I only know if I pay a price, I want something for my money.”
Marilyn shuddered as she opened the car door. She had been away for fifteen years but the neighborhood and the people in it still upset her. It was as if she were still in danger of being sucked back into the ugly rooms and the subways. She recoiled from the nagging voices and was depressed by all the people waiting at windows and stores for time to go by. When she was eighteen she imagined it all to be monstrous and subhuman. Fifteen years later it was only sad and poor, utterly depressing.
“Is the door locked, Ma?” she asked with studied gentleness. “I don’t want to lose you.”
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They drove across Brooklyn to the highway that would take them to Connecticut. “It’s another world,” Celia said. She enjoyed the traffic, the houses, the bright-colored cars. “Palaces,” she said. “Little palaces, each with a garden and a porch. If your father hadn’t been so stubborn, we could have come a long time ago.” After an hour had passed, the towns looked alike and the forests and fields ran into each other. Marilyn turned on the radio to fill the silence.
“It’s only six weeks since Papa went away,” Celia said. “We can live without music a little longer.”
“The children are fine,” Marilyn said for the third time. “And Sidney is busy at the hospital.”
Celia looked for something to say. “Your aunt came last week to say goodbye,” she said cautiously. “She found me in the fruit store and blabbled for two hours. She’s angry with you for the prayer at the cemetery. She’s angry with me for my whole life, for everything I did and everything I didn’t do. My intelligent, educated sister-in-law. Her learning fits her like a hat fits a horse. Do you know what she said to the Tante? She says, ‘I’m living with a man for fifty years. I have children and grandchildren. In a few months I’ll have a great-grandchild. But if I had married him, I couldn’t have stayed two weeks with him.’ And she laughs at me,” Celia said.
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Celia dozed fitfully during the last few miles and awoke with a start when the car stopped.
“We’re home, Mama,” Marilyn said.
Celia took her daughter’s hand so that she could pull herself out of the car. She looked up at the large white house, screened from all the neighbors. “It’s big,” she said, “bigger than I thought.” She put her hands to her ears. “How still it is!”
Then the children came running. She devoured them with her eyes. “Country children with apple cheeks and brown legs. From whom did they get so beautiful?” The older ones ran away, but the youngest let her press her nose against the nape of his neck.
Marilyn took care of the packages while the girls pulled Celia through the house.
“And this,” Joan said, is the living room. . . . and this is Daddy’s office. . . . and the dining room. . . . and upstairs. . . .”
“Take me back to your mother,” Celia begged. “I’m lost. I could never find my way back.”
“Do you like it?” Marilyn asked proudly.
“It’s like a magazine picture,” Celia said. “It’s so perfect, I’m afraid even to sit down.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Marilyn assured her.
“It’s too nice,” she said. “It’s too nice for me.”
Celia examined the bright yellow kitchen and admired the gleaming stove that had no flame and was governed by little buttons. Marilyn showed her all the clever gadgets, while Celia smiled and didn’t listen. “It’s not for me,” she said. “It’s altogether not for me. I’d be afraid to touch anything.”
Marilyn opened the last bag and found the soap dish with a sliver of soap, a battered frying pan, a coat hanger, a fly swatter, and a kitchen clock that had not worked for fifteen years.
Celia watched her with embarrassment. “It’s nothing with nothing,” she said. “I was frightened. I thought maybe I would need some things.”
Marilyn pulled out the remnants of an old kitchen curtain. “What would you need this for?”
Celia opened her mouth and closed it without saying anything. It was too much to explain. “It caught me here,” she said and thumped her chest. “Look it over. If you could use something, keep it. If not, throw it all away.”
Marilyn looked worried. “Why don’t you lie down and rest while I get supper?” she asked.
“I couldn’t help you?” her mother begged.
“You can unpack your things, if you’re not too tired?”
“Who’s tired?” Celia said. “What hard work did I do today?”
She had trouble catching her breath when she climbed up the steps to her room. “You would think I never climbed steps before,” she said jokingly as Marilyn put her boxes on a chair. She insisted on opening everything herself and told her daughter to go.
First she draped an old housedress over the pink chair so that she could sit down on it. She pulled off her shoes and rubbed her toes against the soft blue carpet, while she examined her room. The wallpaper was pink with red roses. The chintz curtains matched the pattern of the paper. She shook her head at her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. Her face looked green against the pink. Her wispy gray hair was as brittle as straw. She hung up one dress and put some underwear in a drawer. She stopped to finger the smooth edge of the bed. The walnut was polished as smooth as glass. She had always insisted on metal beds to discourage the bedbugs and roaches. She tested the mattress and found it smooth and resilient. The children played beneath her window and the baby cried. An insect hummed on the sill and leaves blew against the roof. She tried to think of the empty apartment she had left that morning, but it was in another world. Though she fought to keep them open, her eyes closed.
Something in the breeze that shook the curtains made her dream of a house she hadn’t seen in fifty years. It brought back the feel of the dirt floor and the brook that trickled beside it and the mildew that covered her clothes in the morning.
“We’re here to help you, Grandma,” a shrill young voice squealed into her ear, suddenly. The little boy jumped up on her bed and sat on her as if she were a horse. Two icy little hands covered her eyes.
“Guess who?” the voice said.
Celia hugged them with one hand and pushed them off with the other.
“You didn’t unpack,” the older girl scolded.
Celia struggled to her feet. “First let me wash,” she said. The three children followed her as she opened the closet door and the door to the attic.
“Where could the bathroom have gone?” Joanie giggled.
“Where could it be?” her sister echoed.
“Laugh, little ones,” Celia said. “Laugh at an old grandma. She can’t even find the bathroom or turn on the faucet. She doesn’t know how to work the stove and won’t even be able to boil herself a pot water.”
“I can turn on the stove for you,” the older girl offered. “I’ll turn it on any time you want.”
Celia bent down and kissed her head. “That’s a good girl. Now take everybody downstairs and I’ll come soon.”
When they were gone she pushed the valises and boxes into the empty closet. She brushed her hair and spoke to her reflection in the mirror. “The Garden of Eden is no place for you, Celia.” She knew that in a few days, a week at the most, she would return to her friend the fruit lady and live in a familiar hole. “Oh, dear husband,” she said, “when it comes to changing myself, I’m no better than you. May you sleep well, you in your Garden of Eden and I in mine.”
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