Free Anna in the Afterlife by Merrill Joan Gerber

or not—her fingernails, how she shaped them, her hips, the way she perceived them. And then there were all the people, all the events, all the trips, all the grudges, all the jobs, all the flus and colds—such a wild and magnificent collection of thoughts and experiences. So much misery and worry. And fear—enough of that to choke a person, especially when the children might be in danger.
    This business with Gert’s suicide was a tiny drop in the bucket, a miniscule mosquito bite of an event. Gert’s smallness, pettiness, false sweetness (Abram used to call her “the cat with the velvet claws”), all this hullabaloo about one old lady running the edge of a blade across her veins: where did it figure in the history of the world? It was of no consequence, it didn’t require Anna’s attention anymore. She had other fish to fry and not much time in which to do it.
    In her opinion, Gert, alive or dead, was a closed book. Anna was going to move on to the next subject, whichever appealed to her most, whichever was worth the time she had left. Who knew if, after she was buried, she could take these grand trips across history? For now, she had better be moving along.

A Good Neighborhood
    ANNA HAD BEEN WORRIED for some time that she was a bigot, maybe even a racist. No one ever spoke those words in Brooklyn in 1945 where it was expected that when a colored woman came to clean someone’s house, she would be given her lunch in a special glass plate that was kept separate from the family’s dishes.
    Anna’s cleaning girl, Bessie, got a special place in the bathroom where she hung her good dress on a hook and left her street shoes in a carton below. She worked in a loose faded housedress and shoes without backs. (The pink skin of her heels looked to Anna like the pink underside of Gert’s dog.)
    Bessie was a woman who never said much. She smiled and nodded a great deal and ate silently with her special utensils, never making a sound, not even clinking her fork against her plate. She made the same brief comment to Anna every week: that she was afraid to leave the house after work because her husband had a habit of hiding in the bushes with a knife, waiting for her to come out so he could cut her up.
    Anna actually feared there would be a killing in her alley. She was afraid that when Abram insisted on walking Bessie after work to the trolley stop, Bessie’s husband would kill Abram and leave Anna a penniless widow with two children. Then, like Bessie, she’d have to go to work cleaning other people’s houses.
    Which is why—years later—Anna wanted her grown daughters to live in a good neighborhood far from where colored men waited in the bushes with knives. Even when Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, even when everyone began calling colored people “black” and then stretched it out to “African-American,” Anna could not forget the scars Bessie-from-Brooklyn had on her face, on her back, and on her arms. If violence was Bessie’s fate, Anna wanted to see to it that it was never the fate of her daughters. (How could she have known that Carol would marry a crazy white man who was far more dangerous than Bessie’s husband?)
    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.
    â€œMom,” 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