Dissident Gardens Read online

  Last Sunday morning, Lord, Lord, Lord / Oh, my daddy went a hunting, Lord, Lord, Lord.

  Rose, who reason would suggest might have taken the interval for a chance to invite morning into the apartment, had apparently done the reverse, cinched whatever window shades allowed any margin of daylight, the better to savor the reproving atmosphere of night. She’d then withdrawn to her own bedroom, the darkest room in the apartment. A withdrawal, but not a retreat; she’d left the door open, less invitation than command that Miriam deliver herself into Rose’s sanctum.

  Of course Rose had an excuse, if Miriam could read her mind (she could), for shuttering the apartment: that of shame at a daughter’s nudity cloaked in merely a bedspread. No, Rose’s next move might have been spontaneous, not a plan, the drawn shades were no evidence of forethought. Miriam had to grant Rose’s instinct for improvised spectacles. This one was certainly special. Rose tore at the sash of her robe, tore it open, flung it to the floor at her feet. Then clawed again, at the filmy nightdress beneath, rending the cloth where it held her vast, soft, pale-yellow, mole-strewn breasts so they tumbled out, absurd offering, absurd accusation.

  “I’d tear my heart out and drop it on the floor if I could, to let you see what you’ve done to it. Instead take a look at the body that not only labored you forth but nursed you and bathed you and in order to keep you fed and in clothes allowed itself to be destroyed walking half a mile in shoes with heels every day to the pickle factory because Solomon Real preferred ladies to appear like ladies even while up to their armpits in his brine. Hardly a pretty sight, is it? I’m no Botticelli like you, a sylph in a stinking blanket.” So began the real monologue, the real test. Miriam consoled herself thinking these were essay questions in reverse: Rose wasn’t really interested in answers, just that Miriam meditate on her epic inquisitions. Miriam need only find a way to endure her mother, posture herself to survive but not submit, until Rose’s forces were exhausted.

  A first jab Miriam couldn’t resist, though she knew she shouldn’t jab. “I thought you were the bookkeeper—the brains of Sol’s operation.”

  “In the early years I was side by side with the workers soaking in that piss. That I was the only one who could answer a phone in proper English or add a column of numbers accurately didn’t put me one step above the delivery boys or for that matter the horses dragging the carts. All so you could have the opportunity to attend the finest public university in the world, a privilege the historical rarity of which you couldn’t be expected to understand since you’ve neglected every chance of learning the way the world works, the way the present world, rather than coming into being unprecedented, is in fact a product of history. You’d rather learn the way a man’s schlong works, seemingly. You’d rather attend the college of sexual intercourse!” Rose’s speckled chest was aflame with rage and inspiration, a blush creeping to those breasts barely covered and jostling obscenely for her punctuation. They now appeared scalded, pink moons in the darkened bedroom. Rose detected their bobbing herself and seized them with her hands, enlisted them in her tableau. “Here’s your result, it’s staring you in the face if you hadn’t noticed. He sticks it in you and you become bloated with a child, your body is warped into a battlefield, then enslaved in servitude, the reward for which is a daughter who’ll declare herself done with college at seventeen years of age. A finished product, it seems. Look at you!”

  If Rose was the Red Queen and Miriam Alice, then Miriam’s desired chess move would be to avoid at all costs the squares Rose had titled, absurdly, intercourse and pregnancy. The nearer to matters of the female body, two examples of which were combustively present between them at this instant, the more irrational (if degrees of rationality could even be invoked in this asylum atmosphere), the more combustible Rose would certainly become. No, Miriam had to leap at what looked like possible exits from this territory: Jump to the square marked college education. Matters of the mind. Get Rose thinking in abstractions—the illuminations of Marxism, the betrayals of Stalinism and horrors of Hitlerism, the mercy of Lincolnism, the splendors of American freedom, the rapture of public libraries or honest policemen or Negroes and whites together enjoying Central Park—and Miriam might be halfway home. And, while at it, dress one of those two combustible female bodies, the one Miriam had the power to dress. Let Rose be naked, if she so chose.

  Therefore even as Miriam began to speak in what she hoped were soothingly reasonable tones, she backed in her Statue of Liberty bedspread out of Rose’s bedroom and began groping in her chest of drawers for the rudiments of a fresh outfit. “Mother, I know it’s a terrific system but you have to realize that Queens College isn’t exactly the same as the Manhattan campus. For me it’s like being stuck with the same faces from high school.”

  “The sons and daughters of other good working-class families to which you’re ashamed to admit you belong among?”

  “I’m not alone, Rose. It’s only the squares who aren’t rushing over to MacDougal Street the minute class is over. I learn more in one bull session in Washington Square Park than I ever did at Queens College.”

  “Ah, only squares? Listen to you. Despite the beatnik talk I don’t miss your implication for the rest of us. What licenses you to judge so severely?”

  “You’re telling me you don’t sort the world into those with and without a clue, Rose? Would you prefer if I used your word—sheep?”

  “So these sophisticates flee the minute class is over, yet you’re the one who couldn’t wait even that long. By destroying your studies you’ve squandered your option to transfer to City, if you’re so eager to be away from me, and travel to Harlem to get into the company of the big obnoxious Jews up there. You need a famous atmosphere or you’re bored, is that it?” Rose, her robe now tightened again around the ruined nightdress, had followed Miriam to her doorway. She seemed magically calmed, if it was safe to believe it could happen so quickly.

  “Mother, where did you acquire all the history you throw in my face? In school or elsewhere—at meetings, in coffee shops?”

  “How do you think I became the one who Solomon Real needed to answer his telephones, to repair his double-entry books, to master shorthand for immortalizing his peasant’s prattle. Those poor Jews didn’t stand a chance!”

  “Couldn’t I answer Sol’s telephone? You taught me English.”

  “I didn’t have your opportunities, to throw away like they were worthless.”

  “You never speak of your school days except for the bewilderment of learning that Yiddish wasn’t actually what was spoken there. The shock of realizing you had to start over making yourself American. But I grew up speaking right, because you taught me. The history you want me to recite, you learned it marching in the streets. You learned it reading books they don’t have in the Queens College library. I’ve read those books. Your shelves are better than theirs, Ma.”

  “Ma,” Rose scoffed, but she’d been superbly derailed by Miriam’s flattery. “You sound Italian. Maybe I should have gotten you out of Queens.”

  “I can do Italian,” said Miriam the Mimic, now looking to make Rose laugh. She simply ventriloquized her schoolmate Adele Verapoppa—too easy. “I can do Yid, too,” she said, in perfect Uncle Fred. “I know the difference between Queens and Brooklyn—Toity-Toid Street. You taught me them all, a by-product of teaching me not to have an accent.”

  Miriam, her mind a fog of exhaustion, amazed that night had smeared into this atrocious day without a single blink or nod of sleep, had nonetheless continued to dress herself; the clean dry underwear, the new brassiere and stockings made her feel covered and with some possibility of renewal or escape. But she’d overreached in her flattery. Or something else had turned sour. As she began stepping into a dress, Rose’s face contorted again.

  “Where are you going?” Rose’s voice gripped a lower rung of hysteria. “To him?”

  “Oh, Mother. I’m only putting on clothes.”

  “Could it have been me that purchased for you a whole war
drobe of nothing but poodle skirts and party dresses? Was I such an idiot? Perhaps I’m really to blame, perhaps somehow I shoved you out the door to find a man to lay you because I’m finished myself, dry down below—”

  “Stop, Rose.” Miriam thought better of making mention of her mother’s lover, the lieutenant. Who knew what cataclysm that might set off.

  Yet why think cataclysm was circumventable?

  Rose’s hands tugged at the margins of her robe again, but a repeat performance wasn’t enough, this wanted escalation. Rose sobbed theatrically and collapsed to the floor, absurdly recalling Jackie Wilson, the soul singer Miriam had seen at the Mercury Ballroom in Harlem, she and Lorna Himmelfarb having snuck up on a dare, their white faces beacons of risk and delight in a sea of black. They’d been tolerated, perhaps indulged or even protected, but it wasn’t a chance Miriam would take again without a Negro companion for escort. Now Rose artfully also blocked the door, a grain of pragmatism in her histrionics. The way Rose heaved tears so reminded Miriam of the singer that she found herself issuing a sharp guffaw.

  “How could you. If I was dying it wouldn’t stop you doing as you wished. No doubt you’d step over my body on your way to Greenwich Village or to a man like that one whose name you won’t even condescend to share with me. Step over my dying body on your voyage to where the squares wouldn’t go. But I hardly imagined you’d shower me with laughter as you went past.”

  “You’re not dying, Rose.”

  “I am inside.”

  That’s how you know you’re still alive, Miriam wanted to tell her. Dying inside was for Rose a way of life. Within her mother was a volcano of death. Rose had spent her whole life stoking it, trying to keep the mess inside contained but fuming. In Rose’s lava of disappointment the ideals of American Communism had gone to die their slow death eternally; Rose would never die precisely because she needed to live forever, a flesh monument, commemorating Socialism’s failure as an intimate wound. Rose’s sisters’ unwillingness to defy, by their marriages, by their life stories, the obedient Judaic domestic-life scripts Miriam’s grandparents had salvaged from that shtetl that was neither Poland nor Russia but some unholy no-Jew’s-land between; this rage too had to smolder eternally inside the radioactive container, the unexploded bomb that was Rose Zimmer. God himself had gone inside her to die: Rose’s disbelief, her secularism, wasn’t a freedom from superstition but the tragic burden of her intelligence. God existed just to the puny extent he could disappoint her by his nonexistence, and while he was puny, her anger at him was immense, almost Godlike. Finally, if you dared argue, if you needed proof of Godlessness in this vale of outrage, the Holocaust. Each of the six million was a personal injury nursed within the volcano, too.

  Rose crawled on her hands and knees to the kitchen. Miriam, in her dress now but barefoot, found a correlative response, a non-sequitur antidote to what was before her: She lifted up a magazine that happened to lie on the foyer’s small table, alongside a bowl of keys. Life, Mamie Eisenhower in a flowery yellow hat. Miriam padded after Rose, ostentatiously thumbing through the glossy pages, while her mother slithered to the foot of the stove and reached up. Miriam’s duty was to witness Rose; this had been required of her for what seemed centuries already, inside Miriam’s seventeen years. Witness, confirm, recognize. So: into the kitchen. Lana Turner, in the magazine’s culture pages, looked identical to Mamie on the cover; squint, and they were one woman. Rose flipped the gas dial, then wrenched the oven’s door open like a black mouth and crawled onto its pouting lip to deliver her head inside.

  “I don’t want to live to see you put with child and abandoned as I was by that son of a bitch who was your father. My life’s been nothing but one long heartbreak since the moment he first laid a hand on my body, now you’re walking out the door to finish the job. But I’ll finish it for you. It’s fine, I’ve lived too many years past the destruction of everything that once mattered. I can’t bear to live through the trials of your stupidity and suffering as I did my own. As if I taught you nothing.”

  “You’re not making sense, you put too many things together, Rose.” Miriam flapped the magazine under her arm but refused yet to intervene, to take a step in Rose’s direction. “My father isn’t responsible for everything in your life, he wasn’t around long enough for that. My father, for instance, didn’t humiliate the Soviet, you know. Khrushchev did that.” Could Miriam’s scorn embarrass Rose from her demonstration? Rose flopped her arms as though trying to clamber deeper into the oven, a whale going ashore. If Rose could see her own ass from this vantage she’d quit immediately.

  “I’m already alone, leave me to die as I should have done the moment that thief stole my life and put me with child. I should have taken the baby in my arms and jumped from a bridge.”

  “The baby is me, Rose.”

  “Fatherless a child is worse than dead. We’re castoffs, you and I.” Rose reasoned from within the oven, absurdly. Yet the room had begun to fill with that cloying, fartlike odor Miriam had been expertly trained to regard as a life-or-death disaster. Call the gas company! Open all the doors, run out, find a neighbor! Families they knew hid beyond the walls in both directions, perhaps hearing Rose’s moans and shrieks as they sat at morning coffee and newspaper. Rose was off speaking terms with every single member of them.

  “Speak for yourself. What lies, Rose. After all this time. If you’d wanted me to have a father you could have told me where he was. You wouldn’t let me write a letter.”

  “He tossed you aside without a glance. You think that man had learned to love a child who was barely doing more than combing her doll’s hair by the time he vanished? You couldn’t give him the satisfaction of making an audience for his great rhetorical postures, you couldn’t buy him a drink, you couldn’t prop up his vanities any better than I could. What would you say to such a man in a letter?”

  “A man, everything that happened to you was done by a man. For a revolutionary your heartbreak is awfully pedestrian, Rose.”

  “Pedestrian!” It was, admittedly, a peculiar word to throw at the block-watcher, the Citizens’ Patroller, the consummate enraged flaneur that was Rose Zimmer. Rose was the Pope of Pedestrianism, scalding all of Sunnyside with her inquisitions-on-the-hoof. The stink of gas continued to expand in the room, a headache with the ambition to cure you of every future headache.

  “Rear guard, Mother. Weren’t men and women to be equally responsible for their lives in your revolutionary blueprints? Or are those now going into the oven as well?”

  Every word Miriam hurled at Rose, as well as the exquisite torque with which it was hurled, came straight from Rose herself. Miriam relished this notion, that Rose must feel she faced a renegade self, the demon memorizer of her inmost hypocrisies. You wanted a witness?

  “Rear guard?” Rose cried. Like an animal freeing itself from a burrow in which she’d nosed against a hostile occupant, Rose came clear of the oven. From her knees she tackled Miriam to the floor. For one instant Miriam found herself swept into her mother’s incoherent embrace, arms of iron, bosom of cloying depths, corkscrewed face corroding her own with its bleachy tears. Then, as if she was and had always been only a child, her body to be handled, limbs shoved through sleeves, hoisted bruisingly here and there, a terrifying slackness came over her, feeling Rose’s next intention. Every strength unavailable to Miriam had apparently flowed into her mother’s monstrous wrists and shoulders, her wrestler’s grip. Rose shoved Miriam’s head into the oven. Miriam only slackened. Perhaps it didn’t even matter, so much gas filled the room already. Miriam still preferred not to credit Rose with calculation, despite essentially having begun by sealing the rooms of the apartment. One inspiration flowed into another. This was how you earned the right to inflict murder: by showing a willingness to murder yourself first.

  Perhaps Rose was testing Miriam. Perhaps Miriam tested her back by the absence of struggle: She anyway wanted to believe she’d been defiant, rather than suicidally helpless, when an instant lat
er Rose’s vise clench loosened. Miriam was carried into her mother’s lap as they both fell backward, Miriam’s crown thudding on the oven’s top lip as she came free of it. “You’d do it, you’d die to get away from me,” Rose groaned. She writhed loose from underneath, cutting short their mother-reading-storybook-to-child tableau before the flooding oven, to drape herself in a morose, shuddering heap. One breast found the rent in her nightdress and pooled like pancake batter on the kitchen’s tile.

  Miriam shut off the gas. Then stood, smoothed her disarranged clothing, and went to the kitchen windows, raising the shades to light, the sashes to fresh air. Stepping over her mother without a downward glance, she made the rounds of the apartment’s windows, inviting the cool morning to draw the poison out. It would take a while. By the time Miriam circled to the kitchen door Rose had departed to her room, aligned sepulchrally on its high narrow bed like a figure in a marble crypt, Grant or Lenin.