Free Anna in Chains by Merrill Joan Gerber Page A

rushing around crazily, buying presents. On Wilshire Boulevard, people were stabbing each other with the sharp edges of their packages. Christmas season was a mean season—fat Santa Clauses ringing their bells in everyone’s faces, carols blasting out of loudspeakers, “Let-Us-Adore-Him” and “Christ-the-Lord” in every song. Christmas was a terrible imposition on the Jews. Anna, who had no use for rituals, had made it a special point all her life to ignore Christmas. She left the radio off, didn’t venture out, read only the newspaper’s front page, which had no ads. Long ago she had told her children, “No presents for me. All I want from you is that you should be happy.” Her youngest daughter was a suicide’s widow and had health problems; her oldest girl had money troubles. The truth was she should have allowed them to give her store-bought presents. With her fancy rules, they could give her nothing.
    Now, two days away from Christmas, she was on her way to the doctor’s. All the old people on the bus seemed lame or asthmatic; they were probably all going to the doctor’s, and, like her, they were going alone. What could she expect from a world in which a woman of seventy-eight had to take three buses by herself to visit a doctor? At least, in the old days, doctors had made house calls.
    An old man was making his way up the aisle, stopping beside each seat. He swayed beside Anna as if he might land in her lap. He was unshaven and wearing a tattered coat. Thrusting his fist under Anna’s nose, he offered her a choice of red-striped candy canes. She turned her head sharply, dismissing him. He had probably put cyanide in them. He bent closer, shaking the cellophane bouquet beside her ear until she locked eyes with him and willed him away.
    Well, soon she would be done with Christmases and all the rest of it. How long? She couldn’t guess. The years no longer had any definition—one year was like the snap of a finger, no time at all, a mere one seventy-eighth of her life, almost too small a space to count. When she had first learned to play the piano, at seven, a year had been one seventh of her life. To get from her dull Hanon exercises to her first Chopin nocturne had been an eternity of scales, chords, harmony exercises; endless afternoons of winding her metronome and letting its upright brass ticker measure out the practice hours, the beats, the notes that carried her like tiny black birds, away from the raucous life on the lower east side of New York, and later from the wastes of Brooklyn.
    Now Anna had trouble with her eyes: the birds waiting on the staff, as if poised on telephone wires, were bunched erratically, blurred together, bumping one another as they waited for her signal. She had trouble with her fingers, too: when the birds began to fly they became lost in black, dense clouds, their delicate shapes concealed, their formations blotted. Her trills, once absolute bells of clarity, sounded now like the rumble of the “el” thundering by when she was a little girl.
    A tremendous blast caused Anna to jump halfway out of her seat. A black boy carrying a radio as big as a house had just turned up the volume, and “Silent Night” was coming at her like the open palm of her father’s hand. Automatically she pressed her lips together and held her breath. Her father was dead sixty years and he could still do this to her! Though he had been out of Poland eight years when she entered the public schools of New York, he had stubbornly forbidden her to sing Christmas carols with the other children. She was allowed only to move her lips during the school’s Christmas performances on such phrases as “round yon virgin” and “holy infant.” He had instructed her, fiercely, with his hand held up and ready to smack, to weld her lips shut, to be certain that not a flicker of her breath passed through her vocal cords when the