Anna in the Afterlife (8 page)

When Janet told Anna she and Danny were going to buy a house, Anna counted the life insurance money Abram had left her. Because her granddaughter, Bonnie, was about to enter first grade, Anna offered Janet the down payment for a house on the condition it would be in a part of the city where no men like Bessie's husband would be lurking, in a school district that was guaranteed to be safe.

“Mom,” Janet said, “We want our children to be comfortable with people of all races. We'd
like
to live in a multi-ethnic neighborhood.”

Such fancy words everyone spouted these days: “multi-ethnic,” “rainbow coalition,” “family of man”—so many ads showing children with brown and red and yellow and white skin, all clasping their rainbow hands together. Anna didn't really understand why yellow people, for example, didn't just stay in yellow countries. It was true her parents had come here from another country, but they were at least the same color as those who lived in New York, where they landed. America was too good to everybody and look at the problems it caused.

Still, maybe Anna's urging had had some effect on her daughter, or maybe it was just what the realtor showed them, a house they fell in love with, with two orange trees in the front yard, a plum tree in the back, and a pool on the side. The school was three blocks away, across no big streets, and the neighbors were all white.

Of course the house wasn't in Los Angeles where Anna had her antique store, but in a city an hour to the east, a few minutes drive to the college where Danny was a teacher. Because Anna had been courageous enough to learn to drive in a matter of weeks after Abram died (otherwise she couldn't have continued to run the antique store), she figured out a way to visit the children by driving to their house on streets that never touched a freeway. This was no easy matter, since the freeways had been designed to make a long ride across the city feasible.

With her heart in her mouth, Anna set out to visit the children in their new house holding her breath all the way, knowing that human beings were not meant to speed across the surface of the earth on wheels. But when she arrived laden with rye breads and challahs from the Jewish bakery on Fairfax Avenue, the children greeted her with screams of welcome. “Mom-Mom is here! Yay! Mom-Mom is here!” To be heralded that way was almost worth the panic of the trip.

As soon as she and Janet had piled the breads into the freezer, she would set to work on the main purpose of her visit: educating her grandchildren. Together they played “Sheriff and Deputies” (this developed their reasoning skills), and made up outrageous rhymes (this developed their verbal skills). Anna gave them a musical experience as well, playing a special song on the piano for them, the story of “The Three Princesses.” This was a tale replete with a love theme, a battle theme, a funeral theme, and a wedding march (all taken from famous pieces of music) and even (once the princess and the prince had married) a few bars of “Yes Sir, That's My Baby!” Anna's granddaughters were rapt when hearing the familiar tale: “There were three princesses. One was tall and thin, one was short and fat, and one was young and beautiful.” Her three granddaughters always clamored to know which one of them Anna thought was the “young and beautiful.”

“All of you are young and beautiful,” she assured them. And they were. Anna, who was not maternal herself and did not have a soft heart and was not one to be moved by a pretty face, found herself adoring these girls with all her being. First of all, like her, they were extremely smart. Second, they were musically talented. Third, they had vocabularies like no other children their ages. She saw them as three little Annas, each one going forth in the world to spread her talents, her messages and her philosophy.

Anna's philosophy, which did not include the concept of “multi-ethnic,” was challenged when she learned that her down payment for the house in the good neighborhood was for naught. Almost as soon as Janet's family moved in, the government passed a law that required her precious little girls, flesh of her flesh and mind of her mind, to be bused twenty miles to a colored neighborhood. There descendants of Bessie's husband would share her granddaughters' space, deform their minds, and threaten their bodies.

“Don't worry, Mom,” Janet assured her. “This is good for them. This will help them get along in the world.” Janet—as it turned out—felt it was her obligation to keep up this fiction for years, though when Myra began to say things in Anna's presence like, “No, I
didn't
finish my fucking homework,” Janet would give Anna an apologetic glance and explain it away by saying, “It's just what she hears all day.”

Myra did not even apologize. “I can't bleep out everything I say! That's the way I think. That's how we all talk in my school.”

“Why not send the children to a different school? Maybe a private school?” Anna asked Janet when the children were not in the room. “I'm sure the heads of government, who passed this law, send their own children to private schools.”

“Private school is so snobbish. And, besides, how can we afford it? Didn't you get your schooling in public schools, Mom? Look how smart you are!”

“In my day,” Anna said, “we were all children of immigrants and we all wanted to work hard and become good Americans.”

“And now?”

“Now the children in public school all want to become good dope-takers and good crooks.”

Anna later wondered if she'd crossed the line of good taste by saying her ugly thought out loud. Her daughter had frowned, as if Anna was not as advanced in her evolution as Janet expected her to be. But Janet was not so advanced either, as it turned out. Eventually, after years of being worn down by problem after problem brought on by this busing law, she saw the light and took steps to make a change. But she refused to tell Anna which straw, exactly, had broken her camel's back. Anna was indefatigable in wanting to know and Janet would not discuss it.

“Do I have to be dead and buried before you tell me?” Anna had asked in irritation.

Dead but not buried, Anna was now going to find out. In her new freedom after death, when her granddaughters were not only out of high school and college, they were almost all out of graduate school and the older two married and Jill three months pregnant, she decided to visit their schools in the years when the girls had been placed in classes that specialized in teaching them obscenities. She was avid to learn what, exactly, had happened that had finally made Janet and Danny apply to put all three of them into private school.

She visited first the physical education class where Bonnie, on an ordinary day in ninth grade, was changing her clothes in the locker room of the girls' gym. Because Anna's new ghostly gifts gave her the knack of arriving, in her quest for truth, at the pivotal moment, she could see for herself, in two seconds, that the school smelled bad, was dirty and in ill repair. It hadn't been painted in probably ten years. The water fountain drain was clogged and water sat in its basin. She wouldn't set her body in a place like this for five minutes even if they paid her a million dollars. She saw no reason why any blood relative of hers should have to endure it either.

Bonnie, the granddaughter who resembled Anna the most, was a beautiful and wise girl at the age of fourteen. Her distinguishing glory was that she had never had a haircut; her tresses were something to behold. Longer than her waist, her hair fell in glorious shining waves down her back.

On this day, as she sat on a wooden bench in the locker room, tying the laces of her tennis shoes, a great lumbering colored girl passed in back of her and pulled her hair—hard.

“Hey!” Bonnie cried, “Don't touch me. Cut that out.”

“Okay, bitch,” the girl said. “If you say so.”

This girl—only a teenager but she looked like an overweight woman of forty—went to her metal locker and came back holding a huge pair of scissors. Bonnie, with her head bent again over her laces, didn't see what was about to happen. The girl lifted a hank of Bonnie's hair and chopped it off.

Bonnie screamed and flung her arms up toward her head. The girl threw the clump of hair in Bonnie's lap. “If you tell anyone, bitch, you'll be a bloody heap of shit after school. You won't have teeth to smile with.”

Anna watched her darling grandchild suffering through the day, playing volleyball like a robot, her face frozen, and later having to stand up at the back of the math classroom for an entire hour (punishment meted out by her colored math teacher for coming to class thirty seconds after the bell rang). Never mind that she was late because she had been in the bathroom trying to fasten her remaining ravaged hair in a rubber band.

At the end of the day, when she tumbled off the school bus and staggered home, her mother questioned her and got the details of the attack. Then Janet had to cut off the rest of Bonnie's hair to make it even. This entire incident Janet carefully neglected to relay to Anna.

That was all she had to see of the high school. Now Anna investigated the middle school. She chose to ride home on the school bus with Jill, her middle granddaughter. The driver looked to Anna like the retarded old man who used to walk in her Brooklyn neighborhood pushing a wooden cart and yelling, “I cash clothes.” The lives of all these children were in his care? It seemed outrageous that a school bus could be driven by any vagrant who had a driver's license, any mental defective who was willing to put up with forty screaming kids while driving a rackety old bus. On the day Anna dropped into their midst, the children were imitating the noise of a herd of cows stampeding. Most of them were smashing their feet up and down on the floorboards of the tinny bus and yelling, “Moo! Moo!”

“Attention! Attention,” the bus driver shouted on his loudspeaker system. “Let us have some order here.”

The children drummed their feet all the louder. Jill, who was a shy child, sat nervously while, all around her, her classmates mooed and stomped their shoes. These children, Anna observed, were all white, being bused back home to their neighborhoods of origin at the end of the school day.

The neighborhood that Anna had campaigned for, all white, all suburban, already proved to be not so perfect. Across the street from Janet's house, so cute with its pool and orange trees, lived a fundamentalist Christian minister who seemed to have at least two wives and a houseful of ten children. In his two upstairs bedroom windows he displayed large signs announcing: ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN.

Whenever Janet and Danny took their daily morning walk, they would encounter their minister neighbor on the road running in his jogging suit. Every day they would greet him pleasantly, but this man of the cloth snubbed them every time. Love thy neighbor, my eye, thought Anna. She surmised that because Janet and Danny did not put out Christmas decorations, he knew they were Jewish. He no doubt hated abortion and Jews equally. Another problem with the perfect neighborhood was that Anna's grandchildren had no friends to play with in it. As soon as busing had been made law, all the children who were school friends of Anna's grandchildren were pulled out of public school by their parents and entered into various private schools, many of them church schools. This meant that there were no school friends for Bonnie, Jill, and Myra to befriend after school. There were no PTA meetings at which neighborhood parents might meet, and hardly any parents bothered to travel to school meetings at the public school twenty miles away. Living in a good neighborhood turned out to be as good as living in a desert.

The driver of Jill's bus was becoming furious as the children continued smashing the floor with ever more craziness and shouting. Another few bangs and they'd put their feet through the floorboards. Even Anna didn't approve of this uncontrolled show of bad manners. Jill, she was pleased to notice, was not participating in this disrespect for public property. Suddenly the driver brought the bus to a screeching halt. The foreheads of the children crashed forward against the seats in front of them.

“Out!” he yelled. “Out of the bus, right now! Everyone out!”

Several of the children—they were all boys—jumped gleefully off the bus, but Jill sat alarmed and dumfounded in her seat at the window. She knew she would get home late, that her mother would be waiting for her at the bus stop. She was worried about worrying her mother. Anna could see this in her face.

But the driver was livid. He could go off the deep end and kill all the children. In another life he was probably a child molester and a serial killer. He bellowed down the length of the bus: “Did you hear me? Every one of you goddamn kids—off! Right now!”

Jill was shaking; she was only eight years old. She had never been yelled at this way. She stood trembling and got off the bus with the rest of the children.

The lunatic bus driver shouted, “Okay, now—you little bastards run around the bus in circles till I say you can quit. Then maybe when I say we need some order on the bus, you'll understand what I mean.”

The bus was parked in the middle of the highway; the children were now beginning to run around it, running out in traffic, and running fast because he was shouting, “Faster! Faster!” Jill was crying and running and huffing and panting.

At home Janet waited twenty minutes past the time the bus should have arrived and then ran back to the house and called the school.

“My daughter never got home from school!” she cried.

“We've had no word of any trouble,” the secretary in the office reported. “The bus left school on schedule. Try calling the Transportation Office.”

Janet phoned the school board. She was transferred to the head of transportation who looked up the route she described. “Let's see, that route is assigned an older bus—it has no radio, so I can't check with the driver. Call me in another half hour if your daughter is not home, and I'll send a backup person to check that route.”