Anna in Chains
but you didn’t want to go away from home after the ceremony. You were hysterical.”
    â€œRidiculous.”
    â€œHe thought maybe I could arrange it so you and he could spend the first night alone at our house, then you wouldn’t be so scared. What I had to go through!”
    â€œWhat did you have to go through?” Anna asked. She couldn’t remember a single thing about her wedding except the violent odor of her corsage of gardenias, curling brown at the edges almost as soon as she got them.
    â€œFirst I had to get Mama farmed out. The Bronx relatives finally agreed to take her home with them and bring her back the next day. Then I had to find a place for myself. Do you know where I had to sleep on your wedding night?”
    â€œNo,” Anna said coldly. “The way you adored Abram, maybe it was with him. How should I know what else you’re making up in this crazy story?”
    â€œHe really should have married me,” Gert said. “I have a sweeter nature than you. He would have had a better life with me. The fact is, Rosie Dubin and her husband had just taken an apartment on Ocean Parkway, and they agreed to let me come and sleep there after the ceremony. But they had only one double bed. So I had to sleep in it with them. They made me get in the middle, between them, to prove there wouldn’t be any hanky-panky to embarrass me.”
    â€œIt must have been a big night for you, the famous virgin, sleeping in a bed with a man.”
    â€œWe laughed all night,” Gert said, smiling. A big bus blasted past them, and her hair blew back in the wind. She looked almost young and pretty.
    â€œLate as I married, I always enjoyed sex, Anna. Did you?”
    â€œWhen Donahue has me on as his guest, I’ll discuss it in public, not before.”
    The taxi they’d ordered pulled up, and Gert held the door open as Anna got in. As hard as Anna tried, she could not remember her wedding, her wedding night, her honeymoon. Had she ever enjoyed sex? What a question. She could hardly remember sex. When it happened, it was in the dark, late at night, she was always tired, she kept her eyes closed. Abram never stayed there long, he didn’t bother her too often. What was to enjoy? Did Gert know something she didn’t know? Did her granddaughters? All her life she had considered herself so advanced, but could it be she was the one still in the Dark Ages?
    The taxi driver, a handsome Armenian, drove them toward home. He had some music playing on the radio with a low, hard beat. He seemed to be in another world. On Santa Monica Boulevard they passed a porno movie. They passed young girls strutting about in short shorts. They saw two gay men looking in the window of an underwear store, their arms around each other’s waists. They passed a billboard with a half-naked woman in a bikini, advertising an airline. Gert had a satisfied expression on her face. Anna suddenly grabbed her arm. “I slept in the same bed with Abram thirty-one years, Gert. I had two babies. Doesn’t that prove something to you?”
    â€œWhat does it prove? Who knows which way you were facing?” She took a red lipstick out of her purse and rolled it around her lips without looking in a mirror. She squeezed her lips together. “You know, I had two husbands already,” Gert said. “If this one doesn’t hold out, I’ll find another one. If necessary, I’ll have three, maybe four.”
    â€œYou’re seventy-six years old,” Anna said. “You must be crazy.”
    â€œSo I’m crazy,” Gert said. “You should be so crazy. Here, put on some nice bright lipstick and enjoy your life a little, Anna.

THE NEXT MEAL IS LUNCH
    One of the gay boys across the alley was hucking and hocking in his bathroom, which looked directly into Anna’s kitchen window. She pushed away her dish of cottage cheese—how could a person be expected to eat when these poor

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