Rosa said, “Stella! Would you be alive if I didn’t take you out from there? Dead. You’d be dead! So don’t talk to me how much an old woman costs! I didn’t give you from my store? The big gold mirror, you look in it at your bitter face—I don’t care how pretty, even so it’s bitter—and you forget who gave you presents!”
And as far as Florida is concerned, well, it doesn’t solve anything. I don’t mind telling you now that they would have locked you up if I didn’t agree to get you out of the city then and there. One more public outburst puts you in the bughouse. No more public scandals! For God’s sake, don’t be a crazy person! Live your life!
Rosa said again, “Thieves took it,” and went, scrupulously, meticulously, as if possessed, to count the laundry in the cart.
A pair of underpants was missing. Once more Rosa counted everything: four blouses, three cotton skirts, three brassieres, one half-slip and one regular, two towels, eight pairs of underpants…nine went into the washing machine, the exact number. Degrading. Lost bloomers—dropped God knows where. In the elevator, in the lobby, in the street even. Rosa tugged, and the dress with the blue stripes slid like a coarse colored worm out of twisted bedsheets. The hole in the armpit was bigger now. Stripes, never again anything on her body with stripes! She swore it, but this, fancy and with a low collar, was Stella’s birthday present, Stella bought it. As if innocent, as if ignorant, as if not there. Stella, an ordinary American, indistinguishable! No one could guess what hell she had crawled out of until she opened her mouth and up coiled the smoke of accent.
Again Rosa counted. A fact, one pair of pants lost. An old woman who couldn’t even hang on to her own underwear.
She decided to sew up the hole in the stripes. Instead she put water on to boil for tea and made the bed with the clean sheets from the cart. The box with the shawl would be the last thing. Stella’s letter she pushed under the bed next to the telephone. She tidied all around. Everything had to be nice when the box was opened. She spread jelly on three crackers and deposited a Lipton’s teabag on the Welch’s lid. It was grape jelly, with a picture of Bugs Bunny elevating an officious finger. In spite of Persky’s Danish, empty insides. Always Stella said: Rosa eats little by little, like a tapeworm in the world’s belly.
Then it came to her that Persky had her underpants in his pocket.
Oh, degrading. The shame. Pain in the loins. Burning. Bending in the cafeteria to pick up her pants, all the while tinkering with his teeth. Why didn’t he give them back? He was embarrassed. He had thought a handkerchief. How can a man hand a woman, a stranger, a piece of her own underwear? He could have shoved it right back into the cart, how would that look? A sensitive man, he wanted to spare her. When he came home with her underpants, what then? What could a man, half a widower, do with a pair of female bloomers? Nylon-plus-cotton, the long-thighed kind. Maybe he had filched them on purpose, a sex maniac, a wife among the insane, his parts starved. According to Stella, Rosa also belonged among the insane, Stella had the power to put her there. Very good, they would become neighbors, confidantes, she and Persky’s wife, best friends. The wife would confess all of Persky’s sexual habits. She would explain how it is that a man of this age comes to steal a lady’s personal underwear. Whatever stains in the crotch are nobody’s business. And not only that: a woman with children, Persky’s wife would speak of her son and her married lucky daughters. And Rosa too, never mind how Stella was sour over it, she would tell about Magda, a beautiful young woman of thirty, thirty-one: a doctor married to a doctor; large house in Mamaroneck, New York; two medical offices, one on the first floor, one in the finished basement. Stella was alive, why not Magda? Who was Stella, coarse Stella, to insist that Magda was not alive? Stella the Angel of Death. Magda alive, the pure eyes, the bright hair. Stella, never a mother, who was Stella to mock the kisses Rosa put in Magda’s shawl? She meant to crush it into her mouth. Rosa, a mother the same as anyone, no different from Persky’s wife in the crazy house.
This disease! The university letter, like all of them—five, six postmarks on the envelope. Rosa imagined its pilgrimage: first to the News, the Post, maybe even the Times, then to Rosa’s old store, then to the store’s landlord’s lawyers, then to Stella’s apartment, then to Miami, Florida. A Sherlock Holmes of a letter. It had struggled to find its victim, and for what? More eating alive.
DEPARTMENT OF CLINICAL SOCIAL PATHOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS—IOWA
April 17, 1977
Dear Ms. Lublin:
Though I am not myself a physician, I have lately begun to amass survivor data as rather a considerable specialty. To be concrete: I am presently working on a study, funded by the Minew Foundation of the Kansas–Iowa Institute for Humanitarian Context, designed to research the theory developed by Dr. Arthur R. Hidgeson and known generally as Repressed Animation. Without at this stage going into detail, it may be of some preliminary use to you to know that investigations
