Thoughts from a Queen Sized Bed

By MIMI SCHWARTZ

 

4 A.M. Preface

I am lying in bed, watching white vines climb pale blue walls as they have, day and night, ever since we bought this house with its indestructible wallpaper. Thirty-one years and not a ripple, a bump, a tear, as if we'd just moved in. I imagine a full moon out there behind the room—darkening shades, its shine a soft stage light making papered vines dance in shadow. I imagine crisp stars, Orion's belt touching the tops of cherry trees lining our side of the street.

Beside me, Stu, my husband of forty years, is snoring, not his loud sitcom snores but soft rhythmic sighs trying to be reasonable. I wrap myself around him for comfort but am too hot to stay this way unless I fall asleep in minutes. The goose-down comforter ordered by catalog as "summer weight" is a fake—it's as hot as the old one—and I sweat even with a window open two inches in February. My husband resists this nightly air and wears flannel pajamas in revenge; I, naked, want to feel his skin.

If we had a king-sized bed, or twin beds, or slept in separate rooms, I would have more space to be restless. I could put on a light, read. In my daughter's old room, I could dial old boyfriends from last night's dreams. If I were out of town, I could throw off all covers, take a noisy bath, and sprawl across the bed, unrestrained, in a Marriott or Hyatt silence that lets me sleep but then wakes me, as if I had lost something essential.

I turn my pillow to the cold side and roll toward the weight that pulls me to the center of the bed. I do not listen, as I did in childhood, for footsteps climbing old stairs of fear to get me. I do not run my fingers up and down a papered seam, wishing that yellow rosebuds were warriors with swords drawn.

The dogwood branches scrape the window panes, and I whisper, "Turn over," because my husband is now on his back and I have nothing to hold on to. He moans, obeys, and I press against his butt and spine, focusing on his breathing, in and out, in and out, until his rhythm becomes mine, and I doze for another half-hour.

The essays in this book began in this bed fifteen years ago. They are the thoughts between dozing and waking that rouse me like a soldier hearing gunshots, so I can't retreat back to sleep. Decisions about moths in the closet, what is in the freezer, and who will sew on buttons demand 2 A.M. resolution. So do the 3 A.M. echoes of family stories that I grew up on. How to survive, how to be true to myself, what is beautiful, what is love, all seem imbedded in memory and collective expectations that shaped who I was supposed to become. And whether I embrace or resist these legacies, they leave their mark, forcing me to find my niche between parents who valued sacrifice and obligation and children who pursue freedom and self-realization.

Bodies disappoint us; we will not live forever; parents cannot protect us; we are getting fat. Yes, yes, I know all that but. . . , I say before daybreak, getting out of bed to write down game plans before I forget them and they disappear into air.

"Where are you going?" Stu asks, putting his face two inches from his alarm clock so he could read 5:03 A.M. in white digitals.

"Into my study."

"Wake me at seven, and I'll warm you up," he says, as I put on socks so my feet don't get numb beside the lukewarm heating grates that have just kicked on.

Part 1: Midnight to 5 A.M.

Front Door on the Driveway

My father bought the house in 1941, the story goes, to get out of Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. I was six months old, and he wanted a real house, not a three-room walk-up in a row house of relatives, his brother's family above him. A Dutch Colonial, two towns away in Forest Hills, a few blocks from a family he had known in Germany, seemed perfect—especially for the new baby, ME, the first Yankee in the family. They would rent it, he told the realtor, who said it could be bought for a song because of a foreclosure. Three hours and a fifty-dollar deposit later, my dad got a phone call notifying him that he'd won the bid and owned a house. "But we didn't even see the basement or top floor," my mother said, as they each broke out in a cold sweat. They were Americans now, like it or not.

A bad mistake, a crazy house, I thought for the next eighteen years, because to find us you had to walk off 110th Street onto a narrow cement driveway and make a sharp left twenty yards later, up four brick steps to the "front" porch. It was built to overlook 70th Road, but by the time my parents moved in, right after Pearl Harbor was bombed, our only view was of a high hemlock hedge separating us from the boxy house next door.

We never knew that neighbor, except that she was a squat woman with burnt-red hair and crucifix earrings who gave only two Hershey kisses on Halloween. We did know the Levskys, whose house abutted my bedroom window and whose huge black dog bit me once when I was playing with their son, Bobby. His mom had bleached hair, of which my mother didn't approve, but Bobby and I set up a bedroom phone line with string and paper cups anyway.

And we knew the Goldsmiths across the street, whose varsity-all-star son loved my sister and whose daughter, Arlene, had Shirley Temple curls, dimples, blue eyes, and argyle sweaters—all things I wanted and couldn't have, except for the argyle sweater, which my mother copied for me.

She was an expert knitter, so good that she landed the first American job of the family before she reached Ellis Island. A Mr. Fredericks, so the story goes, had been on their boat, traveling home from a hat-buying trip in Europe, and spotted my two sisters, Ruth and Hannah, wearing matching knit hats and coats, which my mother had designed; he hired her on the spot. So while my father and his two brothers tried to restart a leather business in America, my mother, aunts, and grandmother were knitting slippers, hats, and booties from morning to night. Three years later J. F. Hats wanted my mother as a full-time designer, but my father "wouldn't hear of it" because I was about to be born. I didn't know this until, thirty years later, she told me over lunch, right before I started teaching at a college seventy miles away. 'Weren't you resentful?" I asked. It was the late seventies, the women's movement was in high gear, and no one I knew was staying home just for kids. (Certainly no husband I knew was saying "Don't" out loud.) My mother shook her head. "You were enough," she said, smiling, as I squirmed.

The neighbors my parents liked were the Shulmans, who moved in behind us. Educated people from Vienna, my dad said, and I should play with their children. I hated them, of course. The boy had glasses and wore a bow tie, and the girl had stringy brown hair, worse than mine, and read science books all day long. But even if they'd been my version of perfect, it wouldn't have mattered. I had enough foreignness at home and wasn't about to get more of it voluntarily. America was considered a melting pot then (multiculturalism was not even a word in the 1940s), and I wanted to jump right in. The more I was urged to play with the Schulman kids, the more I went over to P.S. 3 with Bobby and Arlene and some kids from 108th Street to flip for picture trading cards of Blue Boy and Pink Lady in fancy, courtly clothes. Strictly American.

I was just as resistant to Dr. Schmidt, the dour-faced doctor, formerly from Berlin, who made house calls with his black bag and always gave his verdict, sehr schlimm (very, very bad), stroking his chin. And I was a misery on family Sundays when all my aunts, uncles, and cousins would converge at someone's house to feast, plan leather strategies, and gossip, half in English, half in German, while we children whispered in a bedroom about menstruation or the sexy parties Cousin Dora had when her parents weren't home.

"Dora needs a good spanking!" my father would say on the way home when my sister demanded Ruby Passion nail polish or whatever delight Dora had on that week. "And Richard should take his head out of a book and talk more," my mother would add, while I defended him, the one older cousin who was nice to "the pipsqueak," me.

It was my sister Ruth who took on the serious training of a Teutonic father. The battles started when I was four and she was twelve and lasted until she married at nineteen. No, she couldn't wear lipstick. No, she couldn't stay out until midnight, or hang out at Penn Drug after Friday night basketball games, or go steady, or get pinned. Such goings on were unheard of in Germany, my father would shout in fury at least once a week, his face scarlet.

"But Dad, everyone else is. . ."

"You should date the Schulzberger boy. His mother is a Tannhauser and in Germany. . ."

"Dad, this is America!"

They would yell back and forth until a fist slammed on the table. Then angry footsteps would climb the stairs, and I would turn on the radio to Stella Dallas or The Shadow. Someday, I'd vow, I would date the boys I wanted to date, and to hell with my father. Fortunately he'd mellowed by the time I met a boy in bio lab, who had broad shoulders, sexy lips, and parents who came from Russia, via Brooklyn, to Burns Street, across the boulevard from us. And when, six years later, I married this boy named Stu, by then an engineer on his way to California to shoot Ranger rockets to the Moon, my dad was delighted. He finally had the son he'd missed in a house full of women—even if he couldn't recite the parents' genealogy.

There was one thing, besides my mother's raspberry Linzer torte, that I did like about being the child of Jews from Germany: the survival stories. Every weekend my dad, who needed to walk because of his heart, would go up and down the sidewalks of Forest Hills with me, telling me how the family had left Germany, how he and his brothers had outwitted the Nazis and landed us safely in Queens. Their being heroes made me feel braver. But still I shivered during movie newsreels about children from Auschwitz, knowing I was safe only because my father had heard a drumbeat at a town square in Schwarzwald and knew what to do.

The year was 1933, Hitler was campaigning for election in the next town, and my father, who looked like a Prussian soldier with his "Aryan" blond hair and blue eyes, wanted to hear him speak. My mother was afraid, but my dad went anyway, arriving early to get a seat. He had already heard the drumbeats, which had started softly at dawn to call people to the rally and kept getting louder. By noon they were deafening, until Hitler appeared, and they stopped.

Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, the crowd of thousands roared, rising in unison to salute. And my father rose, too, not out of fear, but in response to some hypnotic mass reflex that usurped his will. "I couldn't help myself," he told my mother that night and said they must leave Germany. "This man was too dangerous."

To emigrate to the United States you needed money or a rich sponsor, which he didn't have. So for three years my dad and his brothers used the language of the leather trade to smuggle out their capital. The price of cowhides and goatskins on the world market became a code for specifying behind which toilets, on which trains going from Frankfurt to Switzerland, their money would be taped. My dad, on the Swiss side of the border, would await his brothers' call, board the train, and find the envelopes of cash.

Ten or twelve trains later, the family had enough of a nest egg to start over in America. Three years after that, they were in Queens, and seven years later, my dad was walking with me, telling me all this. It taught me about the art of the possible, how if you were smart and brave and lucky, you could have happy endings in life, even if it meant changing countries just like that.

Curiously, in all our neighborhood travels, I never noticed the other house with the front door on the driveway. It was three blocks away, I found out, when a date got lost on my instructions and called me from its kitchen. I walked over to get him and, sure enough, there was an English Tudor with no apparent front door, just like ours.

I was disappointed. By then—the year was 1956—I had my saddle shoes, my plaid kilt skirts, my crewneck sweaters to fit in, and felt American enough to enjoy being slightly out of cultural sync. I'd even made peace with the Oriental rugs, which I hated all through childhood. "My dad got them at the Persian bazaar when he traveled in his twenties," I'd tell friends who had the normal wall-to-wall carpets that I'd coveted for years.

In fact my parents' rugs are under my feet as I sit in my house in New Jersey, an old colonial with a big front porch, easy to see. After my father died, my mother moved to a carpeted apartment and, as our wood floors were bare, I took the rugs. I had missed the swirling scrolls (they weren't snakes, after all), and my children were pleased because their friends next door, a Catholic family from New Orleans, had similar rugs. We like all the neighbors and see them every Labor Day at a potluck picnic. With the exception of Christmas, when the other windows have colored lights and we go skiing, we feel we fit in.

I still walk past my old house in Queens now and then. We find parking spots nearby when we come back to visit Stu's parents, who, once their two boys left, moved to a new high-rise apartment two blocks away. "I want everything new," Stu's mother, Rose, explained when Stu balked, as I did when my parents sold their house after I left for college. I wanted to keep my room, even if they were tired of the upstairs tub leaking into the front hall.

The house is still white, but the shutters keep changing with each new owner's whim. For years they'd been a hard, glossy black, and I kept looking for mean people to peek out of the windows. Then they were cranberry, and I rang the bell once to ask if I could see my old room, but no one answered. Now they are medium blue, like we had in the 1950s. The other day, when we passed by on our way back from a stuffed-cabbage dinner at Stu's parents', I saw a woman from India, or maybe Iran, with a dark veil, raising the Venetian blinds in the front den. Her eyes were black and solemn, she had a jeweled mark on her forehead, and I wondered, as she disappeared into the room, if she had daughters who went to Forest Hills High and necked to love songs in that room while she slept upstairs?


Published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Copyright 2002 by Mimi Schwartz.
Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press 800-526-2617 and on the web at nebraskapress.unl.edu.