American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [59]
1973
The rain grew harder. The woman opened an umbrella. It was later, decades later, and although much on the street could have been there when the woman with the baby walked into the butcher shop, you could tell by the clothes, the cars, the style of the streetlights, that time had passed. The woman walked up Lexington Avenue past shoe stores and coffee shops and newsstands that sold cigars. They had black awnings that said Optimo in red. She turned east and headed over toward Second Avenue. She walked down a block of brownstones at the end of which stood a tall brick apartment building and she turned under the awning and walked inside. The doorman said hello.
She got her mail from a wall lined with silver mailboxes. There were letters addressed to Mrs. Alex Michaels. And a postcard that began “Dear Iris.” She turned right at the black-and-white sign that read Fallout Shelter and waited for the elevator. She rode up to the twentieth floor. It was one of the last times she would ever enter this building and she was acutely aware of every landmark on her journey home. On her floor she stepped down the hallway and before she had opened the door her little girl was running to her. Mommy, the girl said. The mother scooped up her daughter. She would not tell her that they were leaving yet. Mommy, the girl said, Did you get rained on? Are you wet? Guess what happened!
Tell me everything, Anna, her mother said.
2006
Honor lay down next to Milo in the narrow bed. My mother’s name is Anna, she said.
Is she alive? he asked.
Yes, she said.
That’s good, he said.
But we haven’t seen each other in a long time.
He put his arm over her chest and touched her hair. Why not? he said.
She had me when she was very young, a teenager. It was hard. She wasn’t ready for me. Not really ever. I know she loved me but she was not ready and so it seemed as if she was always gone, in the midst of leaving, never really there. I left to become a dancer when I finished high school. I came back to New York where she was from and she didn’t want to come back. My grandparents had been very disappointed, and once she left New York they cut her off until she would come back. She didn’t. They reached out to her before they died, but she felt it was too late. And by the time I came back they were gone. They both died fairly young.
Where is she now?
I don’t even know.
But you could find out.
I suppose so.
Do you think that’s her? In the apartment?
Right now I think anything is possible.
She leaned her face on the back of his wide shoulder.
Your body is like a haunted house, she said. And it seems as though I live there.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Anna
The shadows and reflections chased each other across the ceiling. Cars enacting an endless search party. How did the lights reach up so many stories? She knew she lived on the twentieth floor and it seemed impossible that the tiny automobiles like Matchbox cars so far below could cast such shadows in her room. But what else could it be? Twenty floors, twenty stories, twenty centuries. She should have felt removed from the street and history and the past so high up above but she was always aware of some force coming from behind to catch her. She was only six. She had an Easy-Bake oven and a firing squad of stuffed animals along her bed and she was reading books nearly as big as she was but nothing could protect her from the eternal race on the ceiling of her bedroom, the screaming from the other room.
When they told her they were not going to live together as a family anymore she thought: Now I understand. The chasing never stops.
So it was with a dark wisdom beyond her years that she had a baby at seventeen. It wasn’t done but she did it. (She never told anyone who the father was, and he, with his ski parka and feathered hair and abashed smiles in the cafeteria, never thought to ask or thank her.) If the past was always coming up behind her she thought she might as well turn around and bite it back. She hadn’t expected to love the girl so much. She hadn’t expected to want to give the