–
When Marian Staley woke up, all she saw was fog. Sleeping in the Studebaker with Linda always made the windows steam up on the inside. She rolled one of them down and looked out. It was foggy on the outside, too. She couldn’t see farther than fifty feet or so. Summer might be only three weeks away, but northern Washington hadn’t got the news.
Linda was snoring in the front seat. She was getting over a cold she’d probably picked up from one of the other children in her class. Packs of kids produced swarms of germs. Marian remembered that from her own elementary-school days. When somebody came down with chicken pox or measles or mumps or scarlet fever, pretty soon the whole class-sometimes the whole school-did.
These days, penicillin flattened scarlet fever. The others kept turning up like the bad pennies they were. They were less common than Linda’s ordinary cold, but not enough less.
Pretty soon, Marian would have to get Linda up, get her breakfast, and take her back to the infectious world of other children. If she thought about things like that, she wouldn’t have to think about the A-bomb crater-and it was exactly that-in her own life.
She’d known going to war was dangerous. You couldn’t help knowing that, in an intellectual way. When countries fought wars, some people didn’t come home again. You built statues to commemorate them, you felt sorry for their widows and other loved ones, and you thought how lucky you were that such a horrible thing hadn’t happened to you.
Only this time it had.
Bill wasn’t coming home again. He’d never take them to a Rainiers game again (not that there’d be any Rainiers games for a while, either). He’d never teach Linda how to tie her shoes. He’d never change a flat tire or install new spark plugs with his usual matter-of-fact competence. He’d never turn off the bedroom light, put his face between her legs, and brazenly flutter his tongue right there, oh God right there….
Marian shied away from that thought hard, like a skittish horse sidestepping and almost rearing when a piece of paper blew across the path in front of it. She was supposed to miss her dead husband because he’d been a good daddy and a good provider, dammit, not because he’d made her feel things she’d never imagined before the first time he got her girdle down and her panties off.
Well, wasn’t she?
She’d been a good girl before she met Bill. Looking back, that felt like a lot of wasted time and wasted fun. It was what they told you to do, though, so you did it-till one day you got so horny, or somebody got you so horny, that you didn’t any more. She’d never do that with him again. He’d never do that with her, do it to her….
She puddled up at the same time as she wanted to touch herself. She missed her dead husband almost every conscious moment. She hadn’t missed him quite like this before, though. Till she woke up this morning, she’d blotted out all thoughts about that part of their life together.
Why? she wondered. Making love, especially making love with somebody you really wanted to make love with you, was the best thing in the world you could do with your time. You couldn’t do it all the time, but didn’t that make the times you could all the sweeter?
When she looked down at her wristwatch, she let out a loud, long, this-is-the-world-and-I’m-stuck-with-it sigh. Then she leaned over the back of the front seat and shook her daughter. “Linda? Linda, honey? Time to get up, sweetie. It’s a school day.”
“I don’t wanna,” Linda muttered, still three-quarters asleep. Kindergarten had gone from exciting, different, new fun to boring routine in nothing flat. Linda was a human being, in other words-still on the small side, but unmistakably one of the tribe.
She eventually did stagger forth from the car. Marian took her to the stinking latrine tent and then to breakfast. The guy behind the counter gave each of them a bowl of cornflakes with reconstituted milk. “Yuck!” Linda said.
“You’ve got to eat it. So do I,” Marian sad. She had instant coffee with it: a meal without a single natural ingredient anywhere in sight. No, that wasn’t true-she did sweeten the coffee with sugar, not saccharine.
“Yuck!” Linda said again, but she emptied her little bowl. She wasn’t fussy about food, for which Marian thanked heaven.
Marian had more trouble choking down her own cereal. As far as she was concerned, powdered milk was as much a chemical weapon as poison gas. It was cheap, and it was much easier to transport than whole milk. That made it ideal for feeding people in refugee camps. It tasted horrible? It was even worse than powdered mashed potatoes (a suppertime unfavorite)? So what? As long as the people stuck in refugee camps got fed at all, the government didn’t care if they hated everything they ate.
She got Linda to the kindergarten on time. Then, without anybody to look after, she had no idea what to do with herself. Those bad thoughts that watching Linda kept her too busy to notice clamored for attention now. She mooched along with her head down, hardly caring where she was going. If not for her little girl, her gloom might have taken an even darker, more self-destructive turn. What really scared her was that it might anyhow.
“Good morning!”
That was so plainly aimed at her, she had to look up. From the guttural r, she already knew it was Fayvl Tabakman. “Hello,” she said to the cobbler.
He studied her with narrowed, worried eyes. “How you are doing?” he asked. His English was quite good, especially since he’d had only a few years speaking it, but perfect it wasn’t.
Marian started to say Fine, the way you did when anybody asked how you were. Only the note of genuine concern she heard in his voice made her answer honestly instead: “Not so hot, Mr. Tabakman. Not so hot.”
He nodded. “I believe you. It is still very new for you, too new to take it all in. You have no notion how such a thing could have happened to you.”
What do you know about it? The angry thought fell to pieces as soon as it formed. He knew all about it. He’d known for years. His loved ones hadn’t died in combat, the way Bill had. They’d been murdered, for no reason at all that anyone sane could find.
“How…How did you get through it without going crazy?” she asked.
“Being at Auschwitz, that was almost a help,” the Jew answered. “I had so much work to do, and I was so busy trying to stay alive my own self, when did I have time to grieve? And I was starving. Everything shuts down then-the feelings, too. So when I was freed and I could start thinking about what happened, time had gone by. Time is a blessing. Every day further away is a blessing.”
“I-suppose so.” It wasn’t so much that Marian didn’t believe as that she hadn’t had enough days go by yet.
“It’s true.” He nodded again, and touched the brim of his cloth cap. “Well, I don’t trouble you no more.”
“You’re not troubling me,” she said quickly. “You know what I’m going through. You know better than I do-you’ve been through it yourself already.”
“Today, tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, one at a time,” Tabakman said. “It’s all you can do. It’s all anybody can do. You want somebody to talk to, I can maybe listen.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “Not a whole bunch of things to do in this place, you know?”
I’m more interesting than twiddling his thumbs, Marian thought. But she couldn’t stay miffed. She didn’t try very hard. Her wound was still fresh and raw. His might have scarred over, but, say what he would, how could it not still fester underneath?
Pain drew pain. Shared pain drew understanding. Or it might, anyhow. She could hope. A little while earlier, she hadn’t been able to imagine even so much. You took what you could get, if you could get anything at all.