The Sunset Gang (19 page)

"Heshy." She sighed. He put his lips on her
nipples and sucked them.

"A nosh," he mumbled.

"Want a cookie?"

They laughed and she reached down and felt him again.

"Your age again, mister?"

"Seventeen."

"I thought so."

She bent down and sucked him erect, waiting patiently,
feeling the pleasure of the process. Herman had begged her to do this and she
had steadfastly refused, although she had done it many times with Heshy. Then,
when he was ready, she put him into her sideways and they spent a long time
together and she felt pleasure, different kinds, and rhythms, many times. Then
he pulled away satisfied.

"I can't believe this is happening," he said,
sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on his white socks.

"You'll never leave Ida," Frieda said suddenly,
without anger, gently, a statement of fact. She had known that from the beginning.

"How could I? After all these years."

"I know."

"But, Frieda, I swear to you. It has never been like
us. Never like us. I can't remember the last time..." His voice trailed
off.

"Don't be embarrassed," she said.

"I'll see you again?" he said, standing up and
putting on his pants.

"Can we stay away?"

"Maybe once a week," he said.

"Of course." It would be impossible any other
way. She remembered how furtive they had been, the smell of the cellar, the
back porch, all of that repeated now. It was all part of it, she thought. When
he was dressed, she straightened his shirt and kissed him on the cheek.

"Watch out for the yentas," she said, letting him
out the back door, seeing his flowered shirt fade into the distance as he
walked toward the clubhouse. He seemed to move away very fast, as if he were
seventeen again....

Poor Herman, she thought, puffing up the pillows of the
couch.

Sophie Berger's troubles began when she slipped on the
bathroom floor and broke her hip. The pain was excruciating, but she managed to
drag her body to the telephone in the living room and call her daughter in Miami Beach.

"Sandy, I'm lying on the floor in the living room. I
fell in the bathroom and I think I broke something."

"My God, Mama. Hang up and call an ambulance. I'll be
right over."

She called an ambulance, which arrived a half-hour later.
She also called her two best friends, Mildred Klepkes and Suzy Friedken, who
ran over quickly. They were dressed to go out to the movies, an event for which
Sophie Berger was preparing at the time of her accident. The two friends eased
her to the couch and put a housecoat over her naked body. Then they gave her
three aspirins, which helped Sophie a little, but she could tell from the
swelling near her hip that something had definitely broken.

"They'll put me in a home now," Sophie cried,
knowing that her tears were not necessarily a result of the pain of her injury.
She could live with that, she knew.

"Don't be morbid, Sophie. It's probably only a
sprain," Milly said, shaking her gray curls and tightening her lips.

"I know it's a hip," Sophie said.

"So it's a hip," Suzy Friedken said. "Sally
Moskowitz broke her hip. And she's fine now."

"She was in a walker for six months," Sophie
said.

"But she's fine now."

"She had a husband," Sophie said, hearing the
familiar sound of the ambulance's siren, the Sunset Village anthem.

The attendants put her gently on a stretcher and began
wheeling her out. She felt a needle prick on the side of a buttock.

"Call Marilyn and Leonard," she said to her
friends. Then she looked up at the attendant and asked. "Where am I
going?"

"To the Poinsettia Beach Memorial Hospital."

"Where else?" she whispered, feeling a softness
descend as they put her into the ambulance.

She had been right in her self-diagnosis. It was as if
years of hypochondria had prepared her for this moment. When she awoke the next
morning, she learned that they had put a pin in her hip and she would have to
be in the hospital for ten days. Sitting beside her, silhouetted against the
bright Florida morning sun, was her daughter Sandy, who lived in Miami Beach. She vaguely recalled having seen her the night before as they wheeled her
into the operating room.

"You feeling okay, Ma?" Sandy asked. Sophie felt
her lips. They had taken out her false teeth and she imagined what her face
must look like.

"I'll live," she answered, feeling the bare gums,
hearing with distaste the slurring of her words.

"It's very common," her daughter said, moving out
of the sun's stream, revealing her worried look, the brave-martyr expression on
her face.

Sophie knew how she felt, pain and love and guilt all mixed
up. She is thinking about the home, Sophie thought, understanding.

"It's a vulnerable point in the anatomy for old
people. But today with modern methods they do wonderfully. Really, Ma. You'll
see."

"You got in touch with Leonard and Marilyn?"

"Of course. They're both very worried. I told them I'd
call as soon as I spoke to you this morning."

Mother and daughter talked for a while, mostly about the
daughter's three children. Sandy's husband, Arnold, was a dentist and they
lived in a fine house on Di Lido Island in Miami Beach. Closing her eyes,
Sophie remembered the details of the house, the large swimming pool, the sound
of the children running through the house, Sandy's voice screeching after them
while Arnold watched the football games. At first they had invited her for
dinner every Sunday and she had dutifully gone, hating to hurt their feelings.
They would drive nearly two hours to pick her up, then two hours back. Mostly
she would sleep over until Monday when Sandy would take her back to Sunset Village.

After a while it became a big schlep, an annoyance that
made her cranky and upset, although she tried to hide it from her daughter. I
love them all, she told herself, but I have nothing in common with them. By
then, of course, she had made friends and would much rather have spent the day
sitting by the pool or playing cards or going out to dinner at Primero's.

"This is too much," she said to Sandy as they came
through the gates of Sunset Village one Monday. She had wanted to say:
"Really Sandy, I am bored by this. I don't want to come. It doesn't mean I
don't love you all. But you have your life and I have mine."

"Really, Ma, it's no trouble," Sandy had said.

"Maybe once a month. And you can always use the
telephone."

"Are you sure, Ma?"

Sophie could see a hopeful glint in her daughter's eye.

"I'm fine, really." There was, she knew, a hint
of whining in the way she said it, but she could not help herself. She could
see her daughter was troubled, but what could Sophie do? She was what she was.

The result was that her daughter called her every day,
sometimes twice a day. But Sophie was relieved from the Sundays. Now she came
only for birthdays. On Passover holidays she flew north to Leonard's house in Scarsdale, splitting her time between his and Marilyn's place in Greenwich. Apparently,
her daughter Marilyn and her son's wife didn't get along. Not that anyone could
get along with Leonard's wife and visiting them, even on the holidays, was a
source of terrible tension between her son and daughter-in-law.

"Why do you invite me if it creates problems between
you and your wife?" she would ask when they were alone, which was often,
because Leonard's wife suddenly became a beehive of activity whenever she
arrived.

"You're my mother. I don't think any further
explanation is needed." Leonard was a lawyer. He had always been very
methodical in his habits and his language. Sometimes he talked too much.

"But if your wife doesn't like me, why punish
yourself?"

"It's not you she doesn't like. Not you per se. It's
merely her way of getting at me."

"And what about her parents?"

"I detest them." He paused. "Actually
they're not half-bad, but as long as she treats you that way I'm going to treat
them that way."

She would look away from him in disgust--not that she
didn't love him.

"Young people are crazy."

"I'm forty-eight."

"I only wish."

After twenty-four hours in Leonard's house, she became
restless and, although none of the tension erupted and her daughter-in-law
would address her politely, she had no illusions about what disruption her
presence was causing. Actually, her being in Florida had hardly changed
anything, since she'd always spent Passover at Leonard's house, even when Ben
was alive. What she dreaded most about visiting Leonard was the time of
parting, when Leonard would attempt to foist a fistful of money into her hands
or her pocketbook.

"I don't need it. I don't want it. You have your
family..." she would protest.

"Ma, the inflation. You could always use the extra
money."

"Absolutely not."

She had the social security and Ben's small pension from
the firm, and they had saved a few dollars, which were in a Savings and Loan.
It was enough. Besides, it was important to be independent.

"You're being stubborn."

She sensed, too, that she might be being cruel to him,
knowing he was tortured with guilt over the way his wife felt about her. What
can I do? she thought, folding the money and firmly putting it back into her
son's hands.

"Ma, please."

She would see his tears, remembering the small boy's eyes
and the fear of the dark.

"I'll keep the lamp on," she would whisper,
holding him in her arms and kissing him on the cheek. He would nod and turn
away, embarrassed by his tears.

But if being at Leonard's house gave her spielkiss after
only twenty-four hours, she began to feel her irritation the moment the door
opened in Marilyn's huge Tudor-style house, in Greenwich's fanciest section.
Marilyn was the dominant one in her home, overbearing actually. Although her
husband Marvin was one of the merchandising world's most powerful executives,
in his own house he was constantly subjected to her daughter's withering
criticism.

She liked Marvin more than Marilyn and it upset her to see
him being treated with disrespect. But Marilyn always had had a big mouth and
had always been argumentative, surly, and obnoxious.

"I'm a bitch, huh, Ma," she would say after some
set-to with Marvin.

"I don't know how he stands you."

"I can't stand myself." She always wore loud,
flashy clothes with heavy helpings of jewelry and make-up, even in the house.
Her children, of course, also thought her ludicrous.

Sometimes Sophie would have to act as arbitrator in her
daughter's domestic riffs.

"So I'm having this party on the eighth." Marilyn
was always having parties. They were sitting in the dining room. The maid had
just cleared the soup dishes.

"Now," Marilyn said, both hands thrust out in
front of her, the forefingers and thumbs set in a circle, "why do I have
to invite the Schwartzes?"

"Because they're my friends, that's why," Marvin
said, his face flushing.

"They're tacky and boring, and after two drinks she
thinks she's a femme fatale and starts pushing her boobies around."

"But they're my friends."

"Children," Sophie interrupted, suddenly
discovering that she had become a kind of conduit for their communication.

"Why must I have to invite people that make the party
miserable? They are two disgusting mockies."

"I grew up with Harry Schwartz. He's my friend. And that
should be enough for you."

"All right then, I'll invite Harriet
Silverstein."

"That whore?"

"See. See." Marilyn looked at her mother for
confirmation of Marvin's hipocrisy. Sophie remained deliberately impassive.

"You forget we nearly had a divorce on our hands. We
found her in our bedroom making love to Sam Weintraub one Saturday night."

"Sam Weintraub would screw a wall. At least Harriet's
amusing and intelligent."

Every meal at Marilyn's house progressed that way and
caused Sophie's digestive system to run amuck.

"Sometimes she's impossible, Ma," Marvin would
tell her when Marilyn was out of earshot, which was not often. Even when she
was, her voice reverberated throughout the house like a stereo system.

"Thank God she grew up and found you, Marvin."

"I don't know where it comes from."

"Occasionally Ben lost his temper." Sophie knew
that Ben had been placid, a giving person. She had worn the pants. What can I
say? she told herself. She was of an age when she accepted her faults,
surrendered to them.

"I loused up your visit again, right, Ma?"
Marilyn would say, kissing her mother on both cheeks. Sophie knew she would be
called four or five times a week to settle some dispute between them, although
she rarely took sides and rarely, if ever, gave advice.

"Mama also thinks you're wrong," she would hear
her daughter say at the other end of the phone, despite Sophie's scrupulous
neutrality.

Sandy came to the hospital three
times during the ten days she was there, but called frequently, as did Leonard
and Marilyn. Her friends called her daily, and even though she felt the
swelling go down and took her first hesitant steps in the walker, she worried
about her future.

Sometimes they put her in a wheel chair and rolled her
around the hospital corridors. It was a gruesome sight, the half-dead and the
walking and rolling wounded. Many of them she knew by sight from Sunset Village, and she nodded to them as she rolled past.

Sometimes she would see a casual friend come by on the way
to visit a patient. Others she would deliberately avoid, like the henna-haired
Molly Fine.

The hospitalization seemed excruciatingly long and she grew
discouraged as she contemplated her future. Yet, she tried to assume a brave
face. They must not think I am helpless, she thought, disgusted that she still
had to use the bedpan.

When they brought her back to her condominium, Sandy insisted on living with her, sleeping on the couch. She filled the refrigerator and
patiently, with an air of mock cheerfulness, waited on her mother hand and
foot. Sophie tried with all her strength to get out of bed alone, but it was
futile to try to do so.

"Go home, Sandy. You've got a family," Sophie
would plead.

"How can I leave?"

"Through the door."

Sophie could see she was torn and, pretending to be asleep,
would overhear her whining into the phone, insisting to her husband that it was
impossible for her to come home. A week after she had returned to Sunset Village, Sandy announced that her brother and sister were coming to visit for the
weekend. Ordinarily Sophie might have felt elation, but this time news of their
coming only fueled her anxieties. She thought to herself, They are coming for a
convention to decide whether they should put Sophie Berger in a home. She knew
the procedure well. The children would come down filled with remorse and guilt
that could be seen like chocolate on their faces. They would have interminable
conversations about the future, even drive the victim out to see the home and
meet the director. Most times they would succeed in their ploy, the victim
would disappear into the home, never to be heard from again, and they would put
the condominium up for sale. Never, Sophie vowed. She redoubled her efforts to
get out of bed by herself, impatient at the slowness of the old bones knitting.
In addition, she had learned at the hospital that she was developing a cataract
on her left eye, but she kept this condition secret. That would cook my goose
for sure, she thought.

The couch in the living room opened up into a double bed
where both Sandy and Marilyn could sleep. They had borrowed a cot from Milly
Klepkes for Leonard. She could tell they meant business by the fact that no one
had planned to go to a motel for the night. She confided her fears to Milly
while her children talked among themselves on the screened porch.