Not that the Urises were doing so badly themselves! The suburb where they lived was a fine one, and the home which they had purchased for $87,000 in 1979 would probably now sell quickly and painlessly for $165,000-not that she wanted to sell, but such things were good to know. She sometimes drove back from the Fox Run Mall in her Volvo (Stanley drove a Mercedes diesel-teasing him, she called it Sedanley) and saw her house, set tastefully back behind low yew hedges, and thought: Who lives there? Why, I do! Mrs Stanley Uris does! This was not an entirely happy thought; mixed with it was a pride so fierce that it sometimes made her feel a bit ill. Once upon a time, you see, there had been a lonely eighteen-year-old girl named Patricia Blum who had been refused entry to the after-prom party that was held at the country club in the upstate town of Glointon, New York. She had been refused admission, of course, because her last name rhymed with plum. That was her, just a skinny little kike plum, 1967 that had been, and such discrimination was against the law, of course, har-de-har-har-har, and besides, it was all over now. Except that for part of her it was never going to be over. Part of her would always be walking back to the car with Michael Rosenblatt, listening to the crushed gravel under her pumps and his rented formal shoes, back to his father’s car, which Michael had borrowed for the evening, and which he had spent the afternoon waxing. Part of her would always be walking next to Michael in his rented white dinner jacket-how it had glimmered in the soft spring night! She had been in a pale green evening gown which her mother declared made her look like a mermaid, and the idea of a kike mermaid was pretty funny, har-de- har-har-har. They had walked with their heads up and she had not wept-not then-but she had understood they weren’t walking back, no, not really; what they had been doing was slinking back, slinking, rhymes with stinking, both of them feeling more Jewish than they had ever felt in their lives, feeling like pawnbrokers, feeling like cattle-car riders, feeling oily, long-nosed, sallow-skinned; feeling like mockies sheenies kikes; wanting to feel angry and not being able to feel angry, the anger came only later, when it didn’t matter. At that moment she had only been able to feel ashamed, had only been able to ache. And then someone had laughed. A high shrill tittering laugh like a fast run of notes on a piano, and in the car she had been able to weep, oh you bet, here is the kike mermaid whose name rhymes with plum just weeping away like crazy. Mike Rosenblatt had put a clumsy, comforting hand on the back of her neck and she had twisted away from it, feeling ashamed, feeling dirty, feeling Jewish.
The house set so tastefully back behind the yew hedges made that better… but not all better. The hurt and shame were still there, and not even being accepted in this quiet, sleekly well-to-do neighborhood could quite make that endless walk with the sound of grating stones beneath their shoes stop happening. Not even being members of this country club, where the maitre d” always greeted them with a quietly respectful “Good evening, Mr and Mrs Uris.” She would come home, cradled in her 1984 Volvo, and she would look at her house sitting on its expanse of green lawn, and she would often-all too often, she supposed-think of that shrill titter. And she would hope that the girl who had tittered was living in a shitty tract house with a goy husband who beat her, that she had been pregnant three times and had miscarried each time, that her husband cheated on her with diseased women, that she had slipped discs and fallen arches and cysts on her dirty tittering tongue.
She would hate herself for these thoughts, these uncharitable thoughts, and promise to do better-to stop drinking these bitter gall-and-wormwood cocktails. Months would go by when she did not think such thoughts. She would think: Maybe all of that is finally past me. I am not that girl of eighteen anymore. I am a woman of thirty-six; the girl who heard the endless click and grate of those driveway stones, the girl who twisted away from Mike Rosenblatt’s hand when he tried to comfort her because it was a Jewish hand, was half a life ago. That silly little mermaid is dead. I can forget her now and just be myself. Okay. Good. Great. But then she would be somewhere-at the supermarket, maybe-and she would hear sudden tittering laughter from the next aisle and her back would prickle, her nipples would go hard and hurtful, her hands would tighten on the bar of the shopping cart or just on each other, and she would think: Someone just told someone else that I’m Jewish, that I’m nothing but a bignose mockie kike, that Stanley’s nothing but a bignose mockie kike, he’s an accountant, sure, Jews are good with numbers, we let them into the country club, we had to, back in 1981 when that bignose mockie gynecologist won his suit, but we laugh at them, we laugh and laugh and laugh. Or she would simply hear the phantom click and grate of stones and think Mermaid! Mermaid!
Then the hate and shame would come flooding back like a migraine headache and she would despair not only for herself but for the whole human race. Werewolves. The book by Denbrough-the one she had tried to read and then put aside-was about werewolves. Werewolves, shit. What did a man like that know about werewolves?
Most of the time, however, she felt better than that-felt she was better than that. She loved her man, she loved her house, and she was usually able to love her life and herself. Things were good. They had not always been that way, of course-were things ever? When she accepted Stanley’s engagement ring, her parents had been both angry and unhappy. She had met him at a sorority party. He had come over to her school from New York State University, where he was a scholarship student. They had been introduced by a mutual friend, and by the time the evening was over, she suspected that she loved him. By the mid-term break, she was sure. When spring came around and Stanley offered her a small diamond ring with a daisy pushed through it, she had accepted it.
In the end, in spite of their qualms, her parents had accepted it as well. There was little else they could do, although Stanley Uris would soon be sallying forth into a job-market glutted with young accountants-and when he went into that jungle, he would do so with no family finances to backstop him, and with their only daughter as his hostage to fortune. But Patty was twenty-two, a woman now, and would herself soon graduate with a BA.
“I’ll be supporting that four-eyed son of a bitch for the rest of my life,” Patty had heard her father say one night. Her mother and father had gone out for dinner, and her father had drunk a little too much.
“Shh, she’ll hear you,” Ruth Blum said.
Patty had lain awake that night until long after midnight, dry-eyed, alternately hot and cold, hating them both. She had spent the next two years trying to get rid of that hate; there was too much hate inside her already. Sometimes when she looked into the mirror she could see the things it was doing to her face, the fine lines it was drawing there. That was a battle she won. Stanley had helped her.
His own parents had been equally concerned about the marriage. They did not, of course, believe their Stanley was destined for a life of squalor and poverty, but they thought “the kids were being hasty.” Donald Uris and Andrea Bertoly had themselves married in their early twenties, but they seemed to have forgotten the fact.
Only Stanley had seemed sure of himself, confident of the future, unconcerned with the pitfalls their parents saw strewn all about “the kids.” And in the end it was his confidence rather than their fears which had been justified. In July of 1972, with the ink barely dry on her diploma, Patty had landed a job teaching shorthand and business English in Traynor, a small town forty miles south of Atlanta. When she thought of how she had come by that job, it always struck her as a little-well, eerie. She had made a list of forty possibles from the ads in the teachers” journals, then had written forty letters over five nights-eight each evening-requesting further information on the job, and an application for each. Twenty-two replies indicated that the positions had been filled. In other cases, a more detailed explanation of the skills needed made it clear she wasn’t in the running; applying would only be a waste of her time and theirs. She had finished with a dozen possibles. Each looked as likely as any other. Stanley had come in while she was puzzling over them and wondering if she could possibly manage to fill out a dozen teaching applications without going totally bonkers. He looked at the strew of papers on the table and then tapped the letter from the Traynor Superintendent of Schools, a letter which to her looked no more or less encouraging than any of the others.
“There,” he said.
She looked up at him, startled by the simple certainty in his voice. “do you know something about Georgia that I don’t?”
“Nope. Only time I was ever there was at the movies.”
She looked at him, an eyebrow cocked.
“Gone with the Wind. Vivien Leigh. Clark Gable. “I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is anothah day.” Do I sound like I come from the South, Patty?”
“Yes. South Bronx. If you don’t know anything about Georgia and you’ve never been there, then why-”
“Because it’s right.”
“You can’t know that, Stanley.”
“Sure I can,” he said simply. “I do.” Looking at him, she had seen he wasn’t joking: he really meant it. She had felt a ripple of unease go up her back.
“How do you know?”
He had been smiling a little. Now the smile faltered, and for a moment he had seemed puzzled. His eyes had darkened, as if he looked inward, consulting some interior device which ticked and whirred correctly but which, ultimately, he understood no more than the average man understands the workings of the watch on his wrist.
“The turtle couldn’t help us,” he said suddenly. He said that quite clearly. She heard it. That inward look-that look of surprised musing-was still on his face, and it was starting to scare her.
“Stanley? What are you talking about? Stanley?
He jerked. She had been eating peaches as she went over the applications, and his hand struck the dish. It fell on the floor and broke. His eyes seemed to clear.
“Oh, shit! I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. Stanley-what were you talking about?”
“I forget,” he said. “But I think we ought to think Georgia, baby-love.”
“But-”
“Trust me,” he said, so she did.
Her interview had gone smashingly. She had known she had the job when she got on the train back to New York. The head of the Business Department had taken an instant liking to Patty, and she to him; she had almost heard the click. The confirming letter had come a week later. The Traynor Consolidated School Department could offer her $9,200 and a probationary contract.
“You are going to starve,” Herbert Blum said when his daughter told him she intended to take the job. “And you will be hot while you starve.”
“Fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett,” Stanley said when she told him what her father had said. She had been furious, near tears, but now she began to giggle, and Stanley swept her into his arms.
Hot they had been; starved they had not. They were married on August 19th, 1972. Patty Uris had gone to her marriage bed a virgin. She had slipped naked between cool sheets at a resort hotel in the Poconos, her mood turbulent and stormy-lightning-flares of wanting and delicious lust, dark clouds of fright. When Stanley slid into bed beside her, ropy with muscle, his penis an exclamation point rising from gingery pubic hair, she had whispered: “don’t hurt me, dear.”
“I will never hurt you,” he said as he took her in his arms, and it was a promise he had kept faithfully until May 27th, 1985-the night of the bath.
Her teaching had gone well. Stanley got a job driving a bakery truck for one hundred dollars a week. In November of that year, when the Traynor Flats Shopping Center opened, he got a job with the H amp; R Block office out there for a hundred and fifty. Their combined income was then $17,000 a year-this seemed a king’s ransom to them, in those days when gas sold for thirty-five cents a gallon and a loaf of white bread could be had for a nickel less than that. In March 1973, with no fuss and no fanfare, Patty Uris had thrown away her birth-control pills.
In 1975 Stanley quit H amp; R Block and opened his own business. All four in-laws agreed that this was a foolhardy move. Not that Stanley should not have his own business-God forbid he should not have his own business! But it was too early, all of them agreed, and it put too much of the financial burden on Patty. (’At least until the pisher knocks her up,” Herbert Blum told his brother morosely after a night of drinking in the kitchen, “and then I’ll be expected to carry them.’) The consensus of in-law opinion on the matter was that a man should not even think about going into business for himself until he had reached a more serene and mature age-seventy-eight, say.
Again, Stanley seemed almost preternaturally confident. He was young, personable, bright, apt. He had made contacts working for Block. All of these things were givens. But he could not have known that Corridor Video, a pioneer in the nascent videotape business, was about to settle on a huge patch of farmed-out land less than ten miles from the suburb to which the Urises had eventually moved in 1979, nor could he have known that Corridor would be in the market for an independent marketing survey less than a year after its move to Traynor. Even if Stan had been privy to some of this information, he surely could not have believed they would give the job to a young, bespectacled Jew who also happened to be a damyankee-a Jew with an easy grin, a hipshot way of walking, a taste for bell-bottomed jeans on his days off, and the last ghosts of his adolescent acne still on his face. Yet they had. They had. And it seemed that Stan had known it all along.
His work for CV led to an offer of a full-time position with the company-starting salary, $30,000 a year.
“And that really is only the start,” Stanley told Patty in bed that night. “They are going to grow like corn in August, my dear. If no one blows up the world in the next ten years or so, they are going to be right up there on the big board along with Kodak and Sony and RCA.”
“So what are you going to do?” she asked, already knowing.
“I am going to tell them what a pleasure it was to do business with them,” he said, and laughed, and drew her close, and kissed her. Moments later he mounted her, and there were climaxes- one, two, and three, like bright rockets going off in a night sky… but there was no baby.
