The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick [best english novels for beginners .txt] 📗

history. To pacify Stella, Rosa called her Dear One, Lovely, Beautiful; she called her Angel; she called her all these things for the sake of peace, but in reality Stella was cold. She had no heart. Stella, already nearly fifty years old, the Angel of Death.

The bed was black, as black as Stella’s will. After a while Rosa had no choice, she took a bundle of laundry in a shopping cart and walked to the laundromat. Though it was only ten in the morning, the sun was killing. Florida, why Florida? Because here they were shells like herself, already fried from the sun. All the same she had nothing in common with them. Old ghosts, old socialists: idealists. The Human Race was all they cared for. Retired workers, they went to lectures, they frequented the damp and shadowy little branch library. She saw them walking with Tolstoy under their arms, with Dostoyevsky. They knew good material. Whatever you wore they would feel between their fingers and give a name to: faille, corduroy, herringbone, shantung, jersey, worsted, velour, crepe. She heard them speak of bias, grosgrain, the “season,” the “length.” Yellow they called mustard. What was pink to everyone else, to them was sunset; orange was tangerine; red, hot tomato. They were from the Bronx, from Brooklyn, lost neighborhoods, burned out. A few were from West End Avenue. Once she met an ex-vegetable-store owner from Columbus Avenue; his store was on Columbus Avenue, his residence not far, on West Seventieth Street, off Central Park. Even in the perpetual garden of Florida, he reminisced about his flowery green heads of romaine lettuce, his glowing strawberries, his sleek avocados.

It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty rib cages.

In the laundromat she sat on a cracked wooden bench and watched the round porthole of the washing machine. Inside, the surf of detergent bubbles frothed and slapped her underwear against the pane.

An old man sat cross-legged beside her, fingering a newspaper. She looked over and saw that the headlines were all in Yiddish. In Florida the men were of higher quality than the women. They knew a little more of the world, they read newspapers, they lived for international affairs. Everything that happened in the Israeli Knesset they followed. But the women only recited meals they used to cook in their old lives—kugel, pirogen, latkes, blintzes, herring salad. Mainly the women thought about their hair. They went to hairdressers and came out into the brilliant day with plantlike crowns the color of zinnias. Sea-green paint on the eyelids. One could pity them: they were in love with rumors of their grandchildren, Katie at Bryn Mawr, Jeff at Princeton. To the grandchildren Florida was a slum, to Rosa it was a zoo.

She had no one but her cold niece in Queens, New York.

“Imagine this,” the old man next to her said. “Just look, first he has Hitler, then he has Siberia, he’s in a camp in Siberia! Next thing he gets away to Sweden, then he comes to New York and he peddles. He’s a peddler, by now he’s got a wife, he’s got kids, so he opens a little store—just a little store, his wife is a sick woman, it’s what you call a bargain store—”

“What?” Rosa said.

“A bargain store on Main Street, a place in Westchester, not even the Bronx. And they come in early in the morning, he didn’t even hang out his shopping bags yet, robbers, muggers, and they choke him, they finish him off. From Siberia he lives for this day!”

Rosa said nothing.

“An innocent man alone in his store. Be glad you’re not up there anymore. On the other hand, here it’s no paradise neither. Believe me, when it comes to muggers and stranglers, there’s no utopia nowhere.”

“My machine’s finished,” Rosa said. “I have to put in the dryer.” She knew about newspapers and their evil reports: a newspaper item herself. WOMAN AXES OWN BIZ. Rosa Lublin, 59, owner of a secondhand furniture store on Utica Avenue, Brooklyn, yesterday afternoon deliberately demolished…The News and the Post. A big photograph, Stella standing near with her mouth stretched and her arms wild. In the Times, six lines.

“Excuse me, I notice you speak with an accent.”

Rosa flushed. “I was born somewhere else, not here.”

“I also was born somewhere else. You’re a refugee? Berlin?”

“Warsaw.”

“I’m also from Warsaw! 1920 I left. 1906 I was born.”

“Happy birthday,” Rosa said. She began to pull her things out of the washing machine. They were twisted into each other like mixed-up snakes.

“Allow me,” said the old man. He put down his paper and helped her untangle. “Imagine this,” he said. “Two people from Warsaw meet in Miami, Florida. In 1910 I didn’t dream of Miami, Florida.”

“My Warsaw isn’t your Warsaw,” Rosa said.

“As long as your Miami, Florida, is my Miami, Florida.” Two whole long rows of glinting dentures smiled at her; he was proud to be a flirt. Together they shoved the snarled load into the dryer. Rosa put in two quarters, and the thundering hum began. They heard the big snaps on the belt of her dress with the blue stripes, the one that was torn in the armpit, under the left sleeve, clanging against the caldron’s metal sides.

“You read Yiddish?” the old man said.

“No.”

“You can speak a few words maybe?”

“No.” My Warsaw isn’t your Warsaw. But she remembered her grandmother’s cradle-croonings: her grandmother was from Minsk. Unter Reyzls vigele shteyt a klorvays tsigele. How Rosa’s mother despised those sounds! When the drying cycle ended, Rosa noticed that the old man handled the clothes like an expert. She was ashamed for him to touch her underpants. Under Rosa’s cradle there’s a clear-white little goat…. But he knew how to find a sleeve, wherever it might be hiding.

“What is it,” he asked, “you’re bashful?”

“No.”

“In Miami, Florida, people are