The Book Borrower (2 page)

“Isn't it supposed to be good for the hair, Miriam?” she'd asked me that night as I walked her home, loyally trying not to mind the smell. Jessie's hair was stringy. She wondered if the urine might give it body. At home, our father screamed at her for an hour. Our mother cried. Mother al-ways cried. She wasn't good for much besides crying. I sound angry and I am. After all this—all that I am about to describe—was over, I escaped from the millinery shop and eventually I went to college. I studied Latin. “Miriam” is al-most an anagram of “I am
ira.
” I am anger. My widowed mother lived with me in my rent-controlled Manhattan apartment for twenty years. She died two months ago, and now that her nagging voice is no longer in my ears, maybe I can pay attention to what I remember, what I am still so angry about.

 

 

—Squirrel's mommy!

—'quirl mommy!

Ruben stuck the book between the mattress and the side of the carriage, as though Deborah and her girls didn't know about it. It was a foolish, old-fashioned book. The little yellowhaired girls caught up, Jill running, Rose tumble-running.

—Do you want a
job
? called Deborah. I forgot. I told someone I'd—

Irritating. Did she look so poor?

—Doing what?

—Teaching. You said you were a teacher.

Had she? Presumably. She said, Maybe I'm no good. Ruben thought of her old, faraway teaching job, of standing in comfortable sun saying Paragraphs! to young people: then for some reason all laughed together, teacher and students.

—You don't have to be good. The pay is terrible.

But Ruben was good. Now they took telephone numbers. Deborah taught child-care workers preparing for the high school equivalency exam.

—Is it math? I can't teach math.

—Sure you can. Mostly it's English. Teach what you want. They'll never take the exam no matter what we do.

Ruben was lonely and slightly miserable, home alone all day with Squirrel. In her pregnancy she'd done nothing but read, here in a new city where she had no friends and had come only because her husband had been hired as assistant budget director in the public works department. All week Ruben pictured him talking on the phone or, seen from behind, pacing a corridor with windows, sun at his left, though she wasn't aware of any such corridor in his office.

Sweat was on Deborah's face and chest above the blue-and-white dress. Her skin was freckled and flushed. She wore eye makeup. Her shoulders were broad. She looked as if she could drive a stick shift or put on a party. Ruben, who hated to drive, couldn't even push the carriage properly.

—I pushed the carriage into a hole because I was reading. The baby fell out.

—Is he all right?

—Because I was reading that book.

—Jeremiah's book? Well, nobody forced you.

—I'm not blaming you!

Deborah Laidlaw picked up Squirrel and held him before her, hands around his chest. Squirrel—without a neck at the moment—blinked. The receiving blanket dropped to the ground. Deborah ignored it. He and she stared, Squirrel's eyes finding something to look at—the gold cross at Deborah's throat?—and Deborah put him back into the carriage, now picked up the blanket. She said, You must never read while pushing the carriage. Said it as if Ruben were so young or so stupid she might not know.

Never mind what Ruben lacked. Her mother hadn't said the right things; or was dead; or had never existed, so that Ruben had to be made by committee from glossy scraps of magazine ads. She blinked like her son because her eyes stung, took the rebuke, liked it.

—I do want a job. But when Deborah turned away again, Ruben thought of her mother, who had existed, but was dead. Not her favorite inner story, the story of her mother's death: a story of temper and its consequences. Ruben did not tell it to herself just then, but she opened the book.

 

 

My parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine.

 

 

So were Ruben's grandparents. Maybe they knew one another.

 

 

I have a feeling that nobody in our family had followed the kosher laws for generations. I once saw a photograph of a shtetl in Russia, including a pig. The caption pointed out that the pig proved that Jews and non-Jews lived in close proximity, but I think it may have proved that my great-grandparents were somewhere around. On the High Holy Days my parents dressed up and went to the movies, where my father translated the subtitles into Yiddish for my mother. They wanted the neighbors to think they were in the synagogue. Not that they didn't consider themselves Jewish; not that they didn't do half a dozen Jewish things—well, religiously. We dressed up on Purim. My mother cooked matzoh ball soup. We ate no bread on Pesach. My mother fasted on Yom Kippur until shortly before lunchtime, while my father screamed about hypocrisy and superstition. Then she had a cup of tea and a dry roll, complaining that it was too dry. An hour later she had another roll, with butter.

I had two sisters. Jessie was two years older than I, and I was three years older than Sarah. My first memory is of my sister Jessie telling me a story to distract me from my mother's screams during Sarah's birth in the other room. It was the middle of the night and we were sitting on the cold kitchen floor. I couldn't believe we could get away with such an infraction, but nobody objected. The story Jessie told was about cockroaches who grew to be the size of people and be-came teachers in school. Until I went to school and even after, I was afraid my teacher might be a cockroach. Much later I read the famous Kafka story.

Our apartment was full of Yiddish shouting. I remember wishing they'd all speak English, but I'm imposing a memory from much later; when I was little, I myself didn't speak English. In this account, I'm going to write what I remember, even if it could not be true, and I'm going to write about what happened to Jessie when I wasn't present, as if I were Jessie at times. When we were teenagers, we argued about memories and couldn't agree whether some of them were mine or hers. Who was it my father kicked in the head, the one time he lost his temper that badly? We each remembered that he did it to the other. We were both sure it wasn't Sarah. Maybe it never happened. Maybe it happened to Sarah.

 

 

—Where is God? said Deborah.

—I don't know anything about God.

—Nobody knows anything about God. Don't you think about that all the time?

—Never, said Ruben. They were pushing Deborah's daughters on the baby swings while Squirrel slept in his carriage. It was raining lightly.

—Then what?

Ruben tried to think what she thought about. Death.

—I too, I too, said Deborah. It was the third time they'd met. Maybe the fourth. You have children, you think about death. I'm pregnant.

—I didn't know!

—I'll show soon. I'd show now in tight clothes.

—When you have more than one child, said Ruben, do you worry less about death?

—Each one is your whole life. Which is not good. There are already too many people I can't do without. My friends . . . now another one.

Ruben didn't know if she meant another child or another friend. To pull their talk back to its odd already customary place, she said, What do you mean, where is God? Isn't God supposed to be everywhere? Do you mean where physically?

Deborah pushed the swing and Jill said, Higher, higher! Deborah ran under it, faced Jill and kissed her, and pushed the swing back, all the way back, running under it again. Then she turned and began pushing in the usual way. She said, I believe in one God, father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. . . . Then she said, It's not just that bad things happen. Where is God then? Out to lunch? But it's more than that. I want to know—well, I want to know about bad things, but I can't know that. What I want to know for everyday occasions is, Where is God when I push Jill on the swing?

—Aren't you still nursing Rose? said Ruben.

—I'm trying to wean her. Besides, she pinches me. She nurses from one breast and pinches the other. Mine, mine. How's she going to like having a liddly?

—A liddly, said Ruben.

—No moozum, not even once this time, Deborah said.

—What's moozum?

—Oh, it's my word for menstrual blood.

At night Ruben said to her husband, Harry, also called Ruben, Oh, this Deborah!