The Book Borrower Read online

  —He’s hard.

  Squirrel often cried. Her nipples were leather. She nursed him on the toilet seat, once in the bathtub but she was afraid she’d drop him—no, afraid she’d stick him under on purpose. He’s hard, she said, but I want another one.

  Deborah was at ease with babies on all sides of her.

  The phone rang and it was Deborah. Again it was Deborah, even on Saturday morning while they had breakfast. Ruben felt that swirl in the throat, as when the teacher said hers was the best; and she was also troubled.

  —What does she want with you? said Harry.

  —Want with me! In moments she was in tears.

  Then a fight. You can be friends with whoever you want, said Harry. I do not claim every bit of your attention, I do not claim all your time, you want to be friends with this Deborah, be friends, I don’t care. If anybody is having second thoughts it’s you, not me.

  Apologies.

  Sex. Nipples so sore she didn’t want him to lie on her, so they did it dog style, but she felt ugly, her breasts hanging low.

  —Maybe I am jealous, he said.

  On Monday, Deborah called for Ruben on the way to the park, but Ruben wasn’t ready.

  —What do you have to do?

  —Vacuum the rug. They stood at the door, Deborah in mustard color, a new maternity dress, her little girls beside her. Ruben didn’t ask Deborah in.

  —You’d give up time with me to vacuum the rug?

  The dismal rug, in midafternoon, when Squirrel wouldn’t stop crying .. . If she didn’t do it first thing, later it looked like something put into a movie to show that the characters have spoiled their lives.

  —I didn’t think you were like that, said Deborah.

  Ruben said, I’ll meet you in the park in ten minutes. She wanted to pee, too. She wanted to change Squirrel. She didn’t want to be hurried. But she didn’t vacuum the rug. She changed the baby, but when she saw his cap on the shelf she took it because the day was sunny. Under the cap was the book Deborah had lent her. She had forgotten. She didn’t ease the carriage down the porch steps, bumping it, hand on the baby’s back, as she usually did. She sat down on the top step and began to read. When Squirrel cried, she nursed him while reading, his smooth, light brown efficient head at her breast, her shirt bunched around his head. Deborah always wore a heavy bra whose straps slipped down her bare shoulders, but Ruben, again, had no bra on; not a political gesture exactly (small breasts, easier to nurse), but almost a political gesture.

  As usual there was crud on her glasses. She cleaned them with a wet finger and read through streaks.

  My father worked in a ladies’ clothing factory, basting in place the collars and cuffs of expensive dresses; then they were sewn by women on machines. He peered as if light hurt and it was painful to take a good look at things. His eyes were red, rheumy, and ugly, with red veins in the whites. When he was young he had read anarchist theory, but as an old man he couldn’t read easily and he stared all day at the newspaper.

  My mother was brave, but expressed her courage as con-tempt. Nothing impressed her, everyone was out to cheat her, everyone was her enemy. Stupid irony was her chief means of communication—not clever irony. Only Sarah, the youngest, broke through Mama’s disdain. I think after Sarah was born my mother refused sex with my father. Maybe, having given my father a great big no, my mother felt better about children, and enjoyed Sarah.

  Several nights a week when we were little, my father entertained men Jessie and I called the Screamers. They screamed mostly in Yiddish, staying until late at night, drinking tea or schnapps. I was convinced that they were bandits. It seemed impossible that they could be invited guests, they made every-body so unhappy. I must have been eight or ten when I first asked Jessie whether she thought the police might be helpful in getting rid of them.

  “The police!” she said. “We don’t have anything to do with the police!”

  “Why not?” My teacher had said we should consult a policeman if we got lost. Like everyone who wasn’t an immi-grant, policemen had the wrong smell, as I put it to myself, but I wasn’t afraid of them. Jessie began an explanation that was far beyond me. I have no idea how she’d learned all she told me: police were bad, the men who visited Papa were good, Papa wanted their visits, she would have liked to be allowed to stay up and listen. The men were planning a better time, she said, when there wouldn’t be suffering and poverty, when everybody would have enough money because people would share equally. It was spring, and we were walking home from the market, where Mama had sent us to buy potatoes. The potatoes were in a bag Mama usually carried, and now Jessie carried it. She spoke in a low voice and looked around her, bending her head seriously. For years I connected radical political ideas with potatoes. I thought I had made the connection from seeing a print, somewhere, of van Gogh’s potato eaters—people presumably in need of such ideas. But one day, crying on the naked shoulder of a bored lover, I told the story of the walk in the spring, the warmth and the light wind and the new leaves and the potatoes, and I realized where the connection in my mind had come from.

  I don’t remember Jessie reading the kind of heavy tome I associate with political theory, but certainly there were anarchist newsletters and papers in the house. Once Jessie persuaded Mama to give her some food for a beggar. Mama finally filled a bag with bread and an apple, then—I think I remember—she spat into it. Could she have done that? I certainly remember Jessie carrying the bag to the door and handing it to a ragged man who waited there. The man turned and in profile I saw him take an enormous bite out of the apple. I never asked my mother if she’d really spat. Spitting was different then, an expressive activity, a major health problem. Signs read “No Spitting.” What happened to those signs? Did more people spit in the old days than now? Where did the old ones get so much saliva?

  Sometimes Jessie was my best friend and sometimes she ignored me and left me to play with Sarah. Sarah was prettier than we were, but not bright. She adored me, which was flattering, but I quickly grew bored with her. I knew my proper companion was Jessie.

  Jessie and my father shared political ideas but disagreed constantly. As she grew he took to screaming at her, accusing her—oddly for an anarchist—of sexual crimes: whoredom, promiscuity. He blamed her for having big breasts, as if she’d grown them on purpose to attract the attention of men. In a household full of women, a man must dream about breasts and wake in agonized sweat if the women are mostly his daughters. And what if his wife has rejected him? Sarah, in time, had big breasts as well, and mine were not tiny.

  By telling Jessie over and over again that he believed she had a sexual life, my father must have given her a kind of permission to consider having one. Or maybe the talk of free love in the anarchist meetings affected Jessie. You talk about it long enough, you need to do it. From the age of twelve, my sister sat in on the meetings, which were sometimes held in restaurants and union halls, sometimes at our house. From the time she was fourteen or fifteen, men—not boys—were asking her to run errands or deliver messages for them.

  I came to understand that sometimes Jessie went with one or another of these men and “did things,” in bed or else-where. Probably rarely in an actual bed. I think that at first I imagined these scenes; later Jessie told me. She had nobody else to tell, of course, not darling stupid Sarah, and certainly not our parents. What amazed me was that Jessie loved sex. I knew about sex, somehow, although certainly my mother hadn’t told me, but of course I thought it must be horrid. Jessie told me sex was delectable. She told me how to masturbate.

  So I will describe something I do know about, though of course I wasn’t there: the night Jessie lost her virginity. She was in love. She was in love with a printer in his thirties named William Platz. He had stolen the key to the print shop where he worked, and at night sometimes he returned there and printed leaflets and pamphlets for the anarchists. Some-times Jessie helped him. One cold night they were walking from the shop to the union hall, their arms laden with pa
mphlets on which the ink was not quite dry and had a pungent smell. After a silence, William Platz asked Jessie solemnly if she were a virgin.

  “Naturally,” said Jessie.

  “And do you, like me, believe that men and women should be free to follow their impulses in these matters?”

  Jessie had never put such an idea into words, but, having grown up in our household, was somewhat lawless in many ways. She didn’t blush.

  I said, when she told me about it, “You didn’t feel modest or frightened?”

  “No, I was happy. I’d loved him for a while, and I didn’t know what we’d do if he loved me back, because he was married.”

  “Will you come with me now?” William Platz had said. She was going with him anyway, to stow the pamphlets in the empty hall, but she understood. On the way, he went into a bakery that baked bread late into the night. Jessie waited outside in the cold and William Platz came out with a big round loaf. He tore off pieces and fed them to her.

  “Big pieces or small pieces?” I asked. Big would mean fierce passion and small would mean tender love.

  “Small pieces,” she said. They made love on William’s coat, which he spread on the floor in an upstairs room of the union hall. It was cold; a stove was nearby but it was unlit. Jessie was afraid of rolling over in passion and hitting her head on the cold stove.

  William Platz left her not long after, though, and that’s how she came to tell me the story.

  “Why didn’t you tell me right away?” I said. “Were you ashamed?”

  “I almost told you, because I was sore,” she said. “But I didn’t think you’d know a remedy.” William Platz dropped Jessie as a lover, but they remained political associates. I didn’t see how that was possible but my sister shrugged.

  By November 1920 Jessie was eighteen and had moved out of our apartment long since, which infuriated my father because she was working as a clerk at the mill and as long as she lived in the house he confiscated her wages. Jessie didn’t graduate from high school; she’d gotten this job when she turned sixteen. When I graduated and got my own job I minded handing my money over to my father, but not as much as Jessie had. All day I’d sew decorations on hats and be polite to ladies, wanting to crush the hats and be rude to the customers, and on the way home at the end of the week, with my money, I tried to convince myself that it would buy a loaf of bread for Sarah, a dress for Sarah, whom I loved.

  I don’t know why we two sisters were as angry as we were. Many people in our circumstances were at peace. Be-fore Jessie moved out, she systematically stole silverware and sheets from my parents, one piece at a time so it wouldn’t be missed. Of course she believed that property was meaningless, but nonetheless. . . .

  Often in life there’s an obvious next step, but most adults would be shocked at the thought of taking it. We have scruples, habits, and deeply held notions: religion, morality, ideology, or custom, and when someone proposes going to bed or when a cup sits on a table at just the time we lack a cup, we consult an inner rule book. Jessie really was an anarchist. Her mind knew no government.

  The anarchist cell in Boynton, Massachusetts, in 1919 and 1920 was sufficiently small and obscure—or Boynton itself was sufficiently small and obscure—that it was not a target in the infamous Palmer Raids during the “Red Scare,” when thousands of radicals and others thought to be radicals were rounded up and threatened with deportation. Anarchists in Boynton mostly contented themselves with writing manifestos and arguing. They read documents aloud to one another in our parlor or in dirty rooms around the city, rooms in which my sister acquired itches of various sorts from men as noble in mind as she. After William Platz there were others, but he was the one she loved. He had broken her heart.

  We’d whisper about men on the trolley, now that Jessie had moved out. The millinery shop was near the mill where she worked, as I’ve said, and we’d meet and ride back and forth together. Ordinarily, on the trip home she’d alight first and I’d watch her stride thumping down the hill, her legs apart—she had a bit of a waddle—toward her rather sordid room. But on the night I’m now describing—I do remember that I began this lopsided account with Jessie and me getting on the trolley after work—she rode all the way with me, for she was coming home for dinner. I was nervous, eager to get her into a good mood so dinner at home wouldn’t be spoiled by fights.

  “Three hippopotamuses today, one giraffe, two lionesses,” I said while Jessie looked out the window as we rode. She was brooding and I was trying to get her attention.

  “Did you sell them all hats?”

  “Some of them. A lioness roared at me. Did you have ad-ventures today, Goosie?”

  “What does that mean? Mr. Franklin praised my alphabetizing. Does that count?”

  “I’m glad he’s kind.”

  “Miriam, he’s kind because I wear clean clothes and speak properly,” said Jessie, “but I don’t care for his sort of kindness.”

  “Why on earth not?” I said. “You do wear clean clothes.”

  “I’m poor. I’m no different from the men in the mill. I don’t want kindnesses they don’t receive. We’re all just pieces of machinery to the bosses.”

  I held my tongue.

  “Look at him,” Jessie said then.

  “At who?”

  “The motorman.” He looked perfectly ordinary.

  “The company wants to cut his pay by twenty-five percent,” Jessie said. “Does he look as if he deserves that?”

  “What did he do? How did you know?” I said.

  “Not just this man—all the motormen and conductors. There’s going to be a trolley strike.”

  I couldn’t imagine it—the fatherly motorman braking the trolley, seizing his conductor by the arm, and departing, re-fusing to take us home. The trolley, it seemed to me, had always been there and would always be, although in fact trolleys were a relatively recent addition to the American scene, and by the time Jessie and I were young women, the trolley period was almost over. The lines had been stretched across the vast acreage of the United States at the turn of the century, and they were all over the place. I know I can’t convey what it was like. All the routes intersected everywhere. The streetcar was something safe and rattly anyone could walk to the corner and jump on. We could also ride out into the country, simply, without going downtown to a big station and getting a fancy schedule and buying a ticket in advance. The interurbans hurtled through the fields; my favorite line ran along a river and within a few minutes, instead of staring at tenements and brick factory buildings, I was spotting turtles sunning themselves on rocks. The trolleys were every-where—but cars and buses were becoming prevalent. There were fewer riders all the time. The trolleys were owned by private companies, as I was soon to understand, and when the company in Boynton calmly announced that the workers were going to have to accept a twenty-five-percent pay cut, they were doing something that seems impossible now but was not uncommon at that time.

  We left the motorman, that night, to his troubles, and went home to dinner. I remember, next, Jessie bending her head to laugh at something I said—something irreverent, I suppose. I try to bring back the image of my mother, at her end of the table. What was she thinking—besides, that is, worrying that there wasn’t enough meat? She looks at Jessie in the gaslight, in my imagination or my memory, and what happens then? She notices that Jessie’s collar looks dirty (it’s interesting that I remember Jessie talking about clean clothes, because often they weren’t), that Jessie’s big hands are in danger of knocking over Papa’s tea, that her laugh is loud. Mama doesn’t understand the conversation; that would be hard on anybody. We made no effort, by this time, to speak in Yiddish or to translate. Still, I’ll bestow upon my mother some fondness for Jessie, and I don’t think I’m lying. Fanny Lipkin, then, saw how the light made an arc shine on her oldest daughter’s head, and she had the impulse to touch the bright part, as if she thought it might feel different from the rest of Jessie’s hair. There was no way to say such a thing, no
t in Yiddish, which Fanny was forgetting, and certainly not in English, so Fanny would have felt the wish in images, not words. Her hand tingled with the pleasure she’d feel, stroking her daughter’s head—do I go too far?—and instead she reached toward the child nearer her, Sarah, and brusquely set her collar and hair to rights. She wet a finger and cleaned Sarah’s cheek, and Sarah arched her back and leaned away.

  “The Lake Avenue line?” Jessie was saying. For we were, in fact, talking about trolleys. I was. As transportation, not as symbols of the struggles of laborers or the injustices of the powerful. “You’re not being clear.”

  “The country,” I said. “She lives on a farm, with chickens.” Fanny tried to listen.

  I’d made a friend. I brought my lunch and ate it on a bench on the Common, and there I’d met a girl who worked in a bookstore, and who had invited me to take the Lake Avenue trolley to visit her on Sunday, and to bring my sister Sarah. I didn’t actually know whether she lived on a farm, but her family certainly kept a few chickens.

  “Who is this friend?” said Papa.

  Friend Fanny understood. “A Jewish girl?”

  “Not Jewish,” I said.

  Jessie was restless. Her nervous face, which had exaggerated, slightly bulging eyes, moved in and out of the gaslight. She began clearing plates, her skirt slapping furniture. Her big arms came down between my father and me, between me and my mother, like black lines, coming down, rising, again and again. At last, tea spilled.

  “How far?” Papa asked, turning to look at Jessie though he was talking to me. I could see him tense as he watched her. Between us, Jessie and I broke his heart, but I did it more delicately.

  “What difference does it make how far?” I said. “It’s on the trolley line. We’ve passed it on the way to Lake Park.”

  “The Ferris wheel?” said Sarah.

  “Next thing you’ll want to go to Europe,” said my father. “Sarah will ask me for carfare to Russia.”