The Sunset Gang (5 page)

"I put stuff in her soda that made her pee purple and
she screamed like hell." He roared with laughter. It was odd how even now
Itch could remember these transgressions. Beebie had put itching powder in her
brassiere, a live mouse in her underwear drawer, and once he had sneaked in
when she was necking on the couch and made sounds with his rubber-band farter,
but his giggling finally gave him away. Itch could never ever hear a fart
without thinking of Beebie. Thinking of Beebie could balance the pain of Ritzy.

"What did you do all afternoon?" Sadie would ask
after she had returned from her card lessons and was preparing their dinner.

"Went to the shopping center. Then sat by the
pool."

"I'm really learning canasta," she would say.
"And I'm making lots of friends." She would pause, and he knew what
was on her mind.

"Did you meet anyone?"

He hadn't, of course. He had been too busy with the boys in
front of Jake's Candy Store. But how could he tell her that?

"A few people."

"Wonderful." She did not pry. Perhaps she knew,
he thought.

It began to worry him that he might not be able to sustain
the entire rest of his life by thinking about the boys in front of Jake's Candy
Store, an idea which increased both his anxiety and his distaste for this
retirement life. When he had his store, he was busy all day and most of the
night and that had given his life some purpose.

As Sadie became more and more interested in games, she
became less and less interested in the chores of the house. He began to do the
vacuuming and the cleaning, as well as the shopping. Sometimes he would even
prepare the meals.

"They wanted to go another round," she would say
when she arrived home. "I didn't want to. But they're all widows. I said I
have my husband, but I couldn't leave the game."

"It's all right," he said. He genuinely wanted to
see her happy. He wondered if seeing her happy made him happy. Finally he told
himself that this was possible. He had always worked to make other people
happy, his wife, his children, his mother and father.

He had left the chore of doing the wash to her and twice a
week she would go to the little brick house which was the laundromat. She had
always done the wash--almost by common silent consent, like choosing the side
of the bed they each slept on and maintaining it all their lives. That had
simply been her job, her role.

The games, however, began to take up more and more of her
time, and one day she piled the wash in the basket and patted him on the
forearm. "You put in two quarters for the washer and two quarters for the
dryer." And she had left.

He stood looking at the dirty clothes for a moment,
shrugged his shoulders, then lifted the basket, smiling to himself. "I
made my living with schmattas. Now I'll do my retirement with schmattas."

He walked to the little brick house in which there was a
line of washers against one wall and a line of dryers along the other. It was
eleven o'clock and he noticed that most of the people who were there were men.
There seemed more men than the number of machines that were running, but he
ignored that and put his wash in one of the empty machines and, carefully
reading the directions, set the machine going by dropping in two quarters.

"You wait five minutes, then you put in soap," a
man said behind him. He was a thin man with gray hair and a sunken chest, and
when he smiled he revealed gaping holes along his gums.

"I never did this before," Itch said.

"Well, you now got a new hobby."

"I don't know if I'll be doing this all the
time."

"Canasta?" the thin man asked.

Itch nodded.

"You'll be doing it every day. Like me." He
jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Like them."

"What are we going to do about it?"

"You're asking me? I'm one of the schmucks."

He'd said it loud enough for the other men to hear. They
turned their faces toward him.

"Another schmuck," the thin man said. The men
laughed.

Itch felt embarrassed. He hated to be the center of
attention, but before he had a chance to gather his courage, one of the other
men pulled a huge set of woman's panties from his load in the dryer, held it up
in front of his belly and wiggled his hips.

"You're a lucky man," another man said. He held
up a large pair of panties and looked at the group with mock-sad drooping eyes.

Itch noticed a woman standing alone near one of the
machines. She looked up and clicked her tongue.

"Disgusting," she said, shaking her head.

"Listen carefully," the man with few teeth said.
"The yenta comments."

"Grown men," the woman said. "You should be
ashamed." She quickly gathered up her clothes and started toward the door.

"Yenta, Yenta, Cockamenta," the man who held the
large-size panties yelled.

The woman turned at the door and pointed a finger at the
man. "A bunch of putzes," she said.

The men roared at her agitation. Even Itch found himself
laughing. It was the first time, he discovered with wonder, that he had had a
belly laugh since coming to Sunset Village.

"The yentas are everywhere. A whole army of
them," the man with the missing teeth said.

Itch noticed that few of the machines were whirring, but
that the men were still standing around.

"Yenta, Yenta, Cockamenta," the man holding the
big drawers said, squeezing the remark for more laughs.

"Ziggy's a scream," the man with the missing
teeth said. "He keeps us laughing for hours on end."

A woman strained to see into the little house from the
doorway. She squinted and held a pail of dirty wash. Her hair was henna-red and
her powdered face flat white, like an apparition.

"It's Molly Fine," someone yelled.

"How's Sam's teeth, Molly?"

"If you had any feelings, you wouldn't make fun."

"It's only his teeth, Molly," one of the men
said. "It could be something worse."

"They could pull out his schmeckel," Ziggy
whispered and they all roared.

"Come in, yenta," one of the men said.

"Oi, they're still there," she said to herself,
but loud enough for them to hear.

"We're still here, yenta," one of the men
shouted. The others laughed.

"I'll tell the condominium office."

"So tell."

"There are plenty of machines open, yenta."

"I don't need that. You'll give me a headache. I'll
come later. A bunch of nudniks."

Itch could not tell if there was genuine animosity in the
woman's voice.

"Is she angry?" he asked the man with the missing
teeth.

"Not angry."

"Then why won't she come in?" Itch asked.

"Like she said. We're a bunch of nudniks. We'll give
her a headache."

"You don't give me a headache," Itch said.

"You're not a yenta."

"No. Definitely not that."

"You see," the man with the missing teeth said,
holding up a finger, as if he might be giving a lesson of the Talmud,
"this, Sunset Village, is the world of the yentas. The yentas control it.
They own it. It was created for them. Finally they have realized their life
dream about having a place where the yenta is queen."

Itch watched him, a smile breaking over his face. The other
men huddled around listening, jabbing elbows into each other's ribs.

"But not here," the man with the missing teeth
said slowly. He lifted his hand high, finger stiff. "But not in this
place."

The men clapped their hands in exaggerated applause. Two of
them lighted cigars and leaned against the machines. Itch watched them.

"Well, then," Itch said, understanding.
"Then this is the place to be."

His machine had stopped and he bent down to remove the damp
clothes and transfer them to the dryer. The man with the missing teeth stooped
to help him.

"I'm Hymie Kugelman," he said. "I've been here
two years. From the Concourse. You know the Concourse?"

"No. I'm from Brooklyn."

"Brooklyn?" one of the men said. It was the one
who had held up the panties.

"Crown Heights," Itch said.

"I'm from Sheepshead Bay. I was with the Post Office
there for thirty years."

"No wonder it got so screwed up."

"Before that I was in Brownsville."

"Brownsville?" Itch said, lifting his head from
the wash. "So was I."

"Where did you live?"

"Douglass Street. Between Dumont and Livonia,"
Itch said, the memory of Jake's returning.

"I lived on Barret Street, between Sutter and
Pitkin."

"A few blocks," Itch said. "You went to P.S.
One-fifty-six?"

"Right."

"I went to One-eight-three."

"Landsman," the man with the panties said.

Itch held out his hand to the man.

"I'm Itch." He felt his heart lurch with
happiness as the man grasped his hand. "Itch Kramer."

"I'm Heshy Sheinberg. This is Izzy Klein. There's
Arbie Rosenberg and Mitty Katz, and Sunny Hirschberg and Immy Rosen."

Itch shook hands all around and listened to their talk while
the dryer hummed and eventually stopped. But he continued to linger, listening
to the talk of sports and politics and children and women and sometimes the old
days, but they did not dwell on them. After about an hour the men began to
leave and he gathered up his dried laundry and left.

Sadie came home for lunch, which he had made, and they ate
their tuna-fish sandwiches and drank their coffee and talked.

"You did the wash?"

"Yes. It was very simple."

"They want me to play in a regular morning game. I told
them I had a husband, that I couldn't neglect him."

He noted that she was seeking protestation. It was an old
ruse that ran on well-rutted tracks. She used the same device to fish for
compliments.

He finished his sandwich and washed down the remains with
the coffee, knowing she was waiting patiently for his consent, which she knew,
surely, would come. But he did not want to appear too anxious. A frown washed
over his face. Perhaps she really did feel that she was neglecting him.

"You go," he said finally.

"You sure you won't mind?" She was telling him
that he would have to do more of the household chores, to make them lunch, to
do the laundry. Thinking about the laundry warmed him.

The next morning, he could hardly wait for her to leave and
he searched the small condominium for laundry to be done. Unfortunately he
couldn't find any but eyed the towels that hung neatly on the rack in the
bathroom. They had been used only once. There were also his pajamas and his
underwear and shirts and socks from yesterday--a paltry load, hardly worth the
dollar.

When he arrived at the little brick house, most of the men
had already assembled and were lounging about. The narrow room was oddly silent
and although he noticed baskets of clothes at the foot of the washing machines,
he saw that few garments in the skimpy piles were dirty.

"Itch."

The name came to him as a favorite musical phrase, a
toe-tapping tune. He felt as if a light turned on inside of him.

"Waddysay, Itch?" another man said.

"It's old Itch." It was the man with the missing
teeth.

"Hi, Itch."

He wanted to respond. He had remembered all their names.
But his throat had constricted and his eyes misted as he turned away and made
believe he was fiddling with the coin slot, feeling the sweet heaviness of
happiness in his heart.

Whenever Harold Weintraub drove through the imposing brick
gates of Sunset Village, past the fancy colonial gatehouse, which could summon
up images of verboten wasp country clubs, he would smile and shake his head.
Under all these trappings, he told himself, the big showy clubhouse, the neatly
clipped Florida grass, the little blue ponds and dredged canals, the gaily
painted mini-bus trains, the tricycles with their pennants crinkling in the
breeze, lay, at least in his own mind, the unalterable fact that this was
merely a dumping ground for aged Jewish parents of a certain working-class
social strata. They were the Jews who never really made it big, a
counterstereotype, a far cry from the usual "goyishe" perceptions of
the rich kike who knew how to make all that money.

But this time Harold Weintraub wasn't smiling, nor did all
those philosophical musings interfere with his concentration on how to find his
father's condominium. They all look alike, he told himself with exasperation,
as he maneuvered the rented car over the high slow-down bumps and squinted at
the street signs. He hadn't even bothered to telephone his father--which would
not be unusual in itself, since he hated to talk to his father on the phone,
even under ordinary circumstances. The instrument had become a conduit of
hostility, the conversations a frustrating exercise in noncommunication.

"Hey, Pop. It's Harold."

"Whoopee."

"How are you doing?"

"Three months, Harold?"

"You going to start again, Pop?"

"Three months?"

"If that's all you're going to say, I'll hang right
up."

"I can't understand. A boy doesn't call his father for
three months."

"Pop. It's long distance."

"When are you going to come down?"

"Maybe in February."

"That's what you said last February."

"I'm busy as hell, Pop."

"Sure."

"Really."

"Three months. Not to pick up the telephone."

He maneuvered the car into a court, then noting the
unfamiliarity, backed up onto the main road again. In the five years since his
father had come down to Sunset Village from Brooklyn after his mother had died,
he had been here exactly three times, spending no more than four hours
straining for conversation, until the atmosphere became stultifying and, he
sensed, even his father had had enough and was itching to get on with the
rhythm of his life. There was a certain ritualization about each visit. The
mandatory visit to the clubhouse and the pool to "show him off" to
his father's cronies, male and female, all of whom resembled each other.

"My son Harold. This is Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzman. Mr.
Pomerantz. Mr. Berkowitz."

"So good-looking," he would hear one of the
yentas whisper.

"A professional?"

"He's a toy manufacturer," his father would say.
"You know the game 'Foreign Policy'?"

"Adult games actually," Harold would say politely.

"A big shot," his father would say, jerking a
thumb over his shoulder, happy in his moment, a kind of triumph, parading his
progeny. "To me they're toys."

Invariably the conversation would drift toward his marital
status, as if he were an old-maid schoolteacher, a familiar image for his
father, who had spent thirty years as a carpenter for the New York school
system.

"All right, Harold, I'm sorry I asked," the old
man would retort--the subject, Harold knew, was always on the surface of his
father's mind.

"Actually I'm living with a girl," Harold had
told him on his last visit. They had been walking along the edge of the road
and the old man had stopped and turned his tanned face to his son, narrowing
myopic eyes.

"Living with?"

"It's not that my honor is at stake, Pop. It's the
accepted way. Neither of us want marriage. Believe me, it's better. When you
can't stand each other any more, you split."

The old man shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe it's
better."

They resumed their walk. Harold waited for the inevitable.

"Jewish?"

"As a matter of fact, no."

The old man shrugged again.

"A shiksa," he said, rubbing it in, thinking of
how Janice's obviously Irish face would stand out like a beacon in this place.

"You can't find a nice Jewish girl and settle
down?" his father said angrily.

He could see the old man's face flush beneath the tan.
"I am settled."

"And children. What about children?"

"Who the hell wants kids?"

"There you may have a point," his father said,
sticking a gnarled finger near his nose. Then the old man's shoulders sagged
and they had walked slowly back to his place without a word.

But he wouldn't go without an explanation and when they had
gotten back to his father's place, he felt the need to say more.

"Pop"--he said it gently--"times have changed.
It's different now. Freer. Women, too, want this kind of freedom. That's not to
say that someday I won't get married and have kids. There's no need for
commitment, that's all. Janice. Her name is Janice. We care for each other. We
have a lot in common. She's twenty-six, with a great job. Hell, she even shares
expenses. Look, I'll be thirty-one on my next birthday. I've got time. Lots of
time."

"You have time," his father said. "I got no
time."

Harold remembered the conversation, even through his
concentration, as he searched for his father's place, cursing the builder and
his mass-produced look-alike two-storied product, the barracks architecture,
the sameness. He parked in front of a small structure around which people were
clustered. It was the laundromat. Eyes turned toward him. He was obviously an
event. Men and women came toward him. He held out a piece of paper with his
father's address on it, like a greenhorn immigrant lost in the middle of Times Square.

"About a quarter of a mile in that direction," a
gray-haired man said. He wore a sour expression. A woman in a flowered house
dress stood beside him.

"What's his name?"

"Weintraub."

"Weintraub. Weintraub," the woman mused aloud.
"Harry Weintraub?"

"Morris."

"He used to be in the fish business in Philadelphia?" the woman asked. The gray-haired man rolled his eyes skyward and
lifted his hands palms upward.

"No. Morris Weintraub. The New York Weintraub,"
the younger man said.

"A quarter of a mile that way," the gray-haired
man said, motioning toward the woman with his hand as if she were suffering
from body odor.

"From Philadelphia?" he heard the woman ask again
as he stepped back into the car.

Kuchlefel, he thought, remembering an expression of his
mother--Yiddish slang that meant a spoon in everybody's pot. Odd how that world
still survived, in his mind, in these people. He followed the road slowly,
watching for bumps, stopping while a train of tricycles passed, the older men
and women chatting as they passed, smiling like kids in organized play at a summer
camp.

What the hell was he doing here? he wondered. In the middle
of the week. Away from his office in the middle of the week.

He had actually felt the compulsion to go at three A.M. as
he tossed in bed, hearing Janice's even breathing beside him. He had quietly
slipped out from under the covers and padded to the living room, fished into
the cigarette box, lighting up and inhaling, something he had not done for
years. It went down harsh and he stifled a cough.

"I forgot," Janice had said simply. She had
broken the news to him at dinner and he had felt the lamb chop turn to lead in
his stomach.

"How can you forget?"

"Believe me. It's easy."

"It's like playing Russian roulette."

"Yeah," she had said with heavy sarcasm.
"Goddamned diaphragm. Ah did'in know wad luv can do," she mimicked.

"How was I supposed to know?"

Her eyes misted. She reached out and patted his arm.

"It's my fault, kid. A stiff cock and my memory turns
to glop."

"Jesus. It's not funny."

"I'm not laughing." She sighed. "No sweat.
I'll have the pussy vacuumed and that will be that."

"Our kid?"

"It's my body." She looked at him archly.
"Hey, which side are you on? I'm the Catholic, remember."

"How long has it been?" He must have looked very
serious, reflective. A brief frown, perhaps a sudden tug of truth, wrinkled her
face like a bolt of lightning. Feeling his own embarrassment, he checked
himself from making any further clinical inquiries. But it was too late. She
had caught his drift.

"I'm four weeks over. The rabbit test is positive.
It's well within the limits of an easy abortion. It's just a few hours out of
my day and a little rest, that's all. I'll take off Friday and be back to work
Monday. So it'll louse up our weekend." They had planned a country drive.
She had chucked him under the chin. "Look, kid. It happens."

He took her in his arms and kissed her hair, watching his
own face in the mirror behind her. He felt his unhappiness and pressed her
closer.

"I love you," he whispered.

"Jeezuz," she said, moving apart and watching his
eyes. "It's not the end of the world."

Which was precisely the point of his own uneasiness. He had
sat up half the night and chain-smoked, mulling it over. My kid, he thought,
picturing a young boy, perhaps as he had been. It was then that he thought of
his own father and the gnarled workman's hands that he had clutched on endless
walks through parks and zoos and parades and circuses. This is stupid, he told
himself when dawn poked through the edges of the blinds and, smashing out the
cigarette, he crawled into bed quietly beside her. She slept peacefully.
Perhaps it didn't matter.

But the idea of it would not go away. As a faraway
abstraction abortion had always seemed right, attractive actually since it
foreclosed on the complication of unwanted progeny. It's an option, a choice,
he told himself, arguing that it was a sensible approach to a biological
problem. My God, he told himself, deliberately keeping himself stiff beside
her, that's not the issue, it's my damned kid.

In the morning, he told her that he was going to go down
and visit his father for the day. She looked up quickly, doughnut poised in
mid-air, dripping coffee drops on the front page of
The New York Times
.

"He okay?"

"I think so. I'm feeling a little pang of guilt, I
guess. Haven't seen him for nearly two years. It's a light week anyway. What
the hell? It's only a day."

"Nice Jewish boys," she said sprightly, a broad
smile breaking.

Was she as concerned? What did the abortion mean to her? He
wanted to ask, but felt himself waiting for something, a message, a signal. It
never came, only the brief rustle of the paper as she turned the page.

He followed the directions and finally recognized his
father's street, confirming the numbers. Mr. Weintraub lived on the upper story
of the two-story building. After parking the car, he took off his jacket and,
holding the loop, swung it over one shoulder. As he stood before the green door
waiting to rap the door knocker, he wondered why his heart was beating so fast.
He'll go straight through the roof, he smiled, banging on the knocker.

He heard a movement inside, the shuffling, and the door was
opened slowly. A gray-haired woman in a flowered house dress stood before him,
waiting for a response.

"I'm sorry." He stepped back to look again at the
number on the door. "I must have got it wrong somehow. I'm having a devil
of a time finding my father's place."

"Who?" She seemed a little hard of hearing.

"Morris Weintraub."

"Morris?"

He heard a toilet flush and a door click open.

"You called me, Ida?" He heard his father's voice
from inside the apartment. Then his father was beside the woman, looking at
him, squinting into his eyes.

"Pop." Harold moved beside him and kissed him on
the cheek. The old man grabbed his forearm.

"Harold." He seemed beside himself with joy. He looked
at the woman beside him. "This is my Harold."

He felt a long pause, a hesitation, as he stood in the
center of the living room, knowing that his father was assembling his thoughts,
preparing himself as he had seen him do over the years.

"This is Mrs. Schwartzman," the older man said,
stumbling over his words. The woman's hands fluttered as she smoothed her house
dress.

"I'll make some coffee." She moved into the
little kitchen, visible through the lattice doors over the countertop and
busied herself with the coffeemaking, loudly enough to assure them that she was
not listening.

Harold had, of course, drawn his conclusions instantly. The
uncommon articles and photographs in the room offered confirmation.

"I was actually passing through on business," Harold
said, noting that despite his tan, old age was setting its mask on his father's
face.

"I hadn't expected--" Mr. Weintraub began looking
through the shutters that separated the kitchen from the living room.

"I can see," Harold said, unable to hide his sarcasm,
instantly regretful. Why should it annoy me? he asked himself. A twitch in his
father's cheek signaled the older man's displeasure, a sign of his special kind
of seething nature, which Harold had observed in their early life together.
They sat silently for a while until Mrs. Schwartzman brought their coffee and
put it on the cocktail table.

"I promised the Fines," she said, forcing a
smile. The smile was tight, too ingratiating. He noted that her lips trembled.

"No, really, Mrs.--" Harold said.

"Schwartzman," his father quickly said.

"I promised. Besides you should have a little time
together." She took her pocketbook from the top of the television set.

"You'll come back soon, Ida?"

He could see the extent of his father's anxiety now,
feeling pity.