Free Anna in the Afterlife by Merrill Joan Gerber Page B

world.” Janet—as it turned out—felt it was her obligation to keep up this fiction for years, though when Myra began to say things in Anna’s presence like, “No, I didn’t finish my fucking homework,” Janet would give Anna an apologetic glance and explain it away by saying, “It’s just what she hears all day.”
    Myra did not even apologize. “I can’t bleep out everything I say! That’s the way I think. That’s how we all talk in my school.”
    â€œWhy not send the children to a different school? Maybe a private school?” Anna asked Janet when the children were not in the room. “I’m sure the heads of government, who passed this law, send their own children to private schools.”
    â€œPrivate school is so snobbish. And, besides, how can we afford it? Didn’t you get your schooling in public schools, Mom? Look how smart you are!”
    â€œIn my day,” Anna said, “we were all children of immigrants and we all wanted to work hard and become good Americans.”
    â€œAnd now?”
    â€œNow the children in public school all want to become good dope-takers and good crooks.”
    Anna later wondered if she’d crossed the line of good taste by saying her ugly thought out loud. Her daughter had frowned, as if Anna was not as advanced in her evolution as Janet expected her to be. But Janet was not so advanced either, as it turned out. Eventually, after years of being worn down by problem after problem brought on by this busing law, she saw the light and took steps to make a change. But she refused to tell Anna which straw, exactly, had broken her camel’s back. Anna was indefatigable in wanting to know and Janet would not discuss it.
    â€œDo I have to be dead and buried before you tell me?” Anna had asked in irritation.
    Dead but not buried, Anna was now going to find out. In her new freedom after death, when her granddaughters were not only out of high school and college, they were almost all out of graduate school and the older two married and Jill three months pregnant, she decided to visit their schools in the years when the girls had been placed in classes that specialized in teaching them obscenities. She was avid to learn what, exactly, had happened that had finally made Janet and Danny apply to put all three of them into private school.
    She visited first the physical education class where Bonnie, on an ordinary day in ninth grade, was changing her clothes in the locker room of the girls’ gym. Because Anna’s new ghostly gifts gave her the knack of arriving, in her quest for truth, at the pivotal moment, she could see for herself, in two seconds, that the school smelled bad, was dirty and in ill repair. It hadn’t been painted in probably ten years. The water fountain drain was clogged and water sat in its basin. She wouldn’t set her body in a place like this for five minutes even if they paid her a million dollars. She saw no reason why any blood relative of hers should have to endure it either.
    Bonnie, the granddaughter who resembled Anna the most, was a beautiful and wise girl at the age of fourteen. Her distinguishing glory was that she had never had a haircut; her tresses were something to behold. Longer than her waist, her hair fell in glorious shining waves down her back.
    On this day, as she sat on a wooden bench in the locker room, tying the laces of her tennis shoes, a great lumbering colored girl passed in back of her and pulled her hair—hard.
    â€œHey!” Bonnie cried, “Don’t touch me. Cut that out.”
    â€œOkay, bitch,” the girl said. “If you say so.”
    This girl—only a teenager but she looked like an overweight woman of forty—went to her metal locker and came back holding a huge pair of scissors. Bonnie, with her head bent again over her laces, didn’t see what was about to happen. The girl lifted a hank of Bonnie’s